[HN Gopher] Musk's first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
___________________________________________________________________
Musk's first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 463 points
Date : 2022-11-10 09:45 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| mrobins wrote:
| Surely this is partially a calculated move to further reduce
| headcount/expenses.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| It probably is, but it's kind of risky if you end up pissing
| off employees who are key to your operations and top
| performers. Those folks can easily find work elsewhere. You end
| up with the people who can't easily move elsewhere.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| If you are key top performer, surely you can get approval to
| work remotely, no?
| bigfudge wrote:
| Probably. But you might not want to work at a place where
| this is at the whim of a manager. Or where your non rock
| star colleagues are treated like shit.
| mcgannon2007 wrote:
| Not necessarily...
|
| https://www.engadget.com/an-apple-machine-learning-
| director-...
|
| And in this specific case, Elon's pride may make him see
| everyone as replaceable.
| greedo wrote:
| Does Musk value developers? Considering his "code review" the
| first week, and how poorly FSD at Tesla functions, (I know
| it's an extremely difficult, if not insurmountable problem) I
| think he has a very simplistic idea of how to both evaluate
| and motivate developers.
| boatsie wrote:
| Many other companies are laying off now, and FAANG is in a
| hiring freeze. Sellers market right now for employment.
| Arainach wrote:
| At this point we have enough evidence to conclude that
| absolutely nothing Musk does is a "calculated move". If this
| drives people to quit it's merely a fringe benefit (benefit
| strictly from Musk's perspective) - this is his normal
| impulsive micromanaging controlling self.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| Unlikely. A more calculated move would be to first remove
| remote work, then reduce headcount to the level you want. The
| other way not only are they paying larger severance, but also
| aren't sure what number of people they end up with and what
| teams will disappear completely.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Ofcourse it is his company so he can do whatever he want but this
| man turned out to be kinda douchebag in last few years.
| thih9 wrote:
| This can't not result in some hidden maintenance or security
| problems.
|
| Half of the people left and the other half has been told to brace
| for difficult times, it doesn't sound like good conditions for
| smooth continuous operation.
| eb0la wrote:
| I wasn't interested in buying a Tesla. Now I won't pay for
| Twitter.
| manjose2018 wrote:
| Whatsapp had 1B users with far fewer eng, why is Twitter so big?
|
| Here is my back of the envelope math of how big I think the
| company should be for their main offering. Over the past years
| Twitter has acquired a ton of companies, but I'm going to leave
| them out of this equation.
|
| Eng (250)
|
| ===========
|
| Backend/Storage: 100 eng
|
| Subscriptions: 50
|
| Front-End: 50 eng
|
| iOS App: 20 eng
|
| Android App: 20 eng
|
| UX: 10
|
| Abuse/Moderation (200) ========================= Abuse: 100
| Moderation: 100
|
| Marketing/Sales (210)
|
| =======================
|
| PR/Marketing: 30
|
| Ad Sales: 180
|
| Mgmt/overhead (40)
|
| =====================
|
| Legal/GDPR/compliance: 20
|
| HR/Recruiting : 10
|
| CEO/CFO/etc.: 10
|
| What do you think? How far off am I? If more people turn to
| subscriptions perhaps the abuse/moderation team will shrink in
| the future.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Twitter isn't the same product(s) as Whatsapp. That difference
| is noticeable within 1 minute of opening both applications.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes, WhatsApp seem more complex.
|
| In all seriousness, I think many of us are falling into the
| trap that the PayPal guy fell into. Twitter isn't just the
| app and the website. So it's much harder to run and maintain
| than it seems like from the outside. If it was just the
| Tweets, why would they ever need more than 10 iOS developers
| for instance?
|
| If we cut Twitter into what it is on the surface, and perhaps
| lose some data retention, then sliming down the engineering
| organization significantly should be possible with the right
| people. Not to 50, that's really low for a platform the size
| of Twitter. That being said: 7500 employees is also way to
| many for what they do, or at least for how little money they
| make.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| >Yes, WhatsApp seem more complex.
|
| K.
|
| Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company. The only reason
| it went through is thanks to a long line of court rulings
| starting with Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. that prioritized
| shareholder interest over every other stakeholders. You
| can't expect to practically traumatize a company's culture
| like this and expect all the "right people" to still stay
| here and give their 100%.
| mrweasel wrote:
| >Yes, WhatsApp seem more complex.
|
| So that was meant as a joke, probably should have left
| that out.
|
| >Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company
|
| Technically I believe he was forced to buy in the end,
| but no. You're right, no one asked him to do anything.
| The shareholders saw an out. They had a failed company on
| their hands and now the PayPal guy shows up and stupidly
| promises to buy the whole thing for way more than it's
| actually worth. Of cause they are going to dump the stock
| on the idiot, by (legal)forced if they had to. Now it's
| Musks problem. He has zero ideals when it comes to
| Twitter culture. He doesn't care. All he currently see is
| 7500 people who needs a paycheck, paid by him. He
| stupidly thought he could run Twitter successfully, like
| most of us HN backseat drivers. When he realized that he
| can't it was to late and now he stuck and have to either
| save the company or at least not lose to much more money.
| dist1ll wrote:
| You forgot operations, tooling, observability, SRE, incidence
| response, etc
| cromka wrote:
| The picture isn't complete unless you also compare it with
| Toyota.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| On WhatsApp, your "post" can be seen by everyone you've
| exchanged phone numbers with. On Twitter, your "post" can be
| seen by the entire world.
| layer8 wrote:
| With 5000 to 10000 tweets being sent per second (~500 million
| per day), 200 employees for abuse/moderation seems low.
| TylerE wrote:
| You really think a total of 200 moderators could come even
| close?
|
| Thats 1.7M tweets a day per moderator. A bit over 3500 per
| minute.
|
| And thats assuming they work 7 days a week, never get sick,
| never take vacation.
| davidguetta wrote:
| Most of moderation is typically outsourced so it doesnt
| countin this list
| myroon5 wrote:
| Related tech staffing thoughts of someone now directly
| involved:
|
| https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-saas-org-chart
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I wonder if the author would change this post to show less
| employees and higher ARR. That's certainly been my experience
| today.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Twitter's business model is a clusterfuck. Whatsapp's isn't.
| jedberg wrote:
| The number one result when you search for Twitter on HN:
|
| Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
| (buzzfeednews.com)
|
| 2953 points by minimaxir on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite
| | 1353 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| I've been told many times that Twitter is a private company and
| can do whatever it wants.
|
| Or does that only apply to the Red team?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| We call this a soft layoff.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Is there any reason for anyone to stay at twitter? I've not seen
| Musk offer any upside anywhere to remaining. He's laying out a
| stark plan of hard work and fewer benefits and a brutal
| management. What reason other than inability to find another job
| (perhaps due to visa status, the hiring freezes at end of year,
| and layoffs) does anyone have for working at twitter now? I'm
| shocked if they don't see another 50+% voluntary attrition in
| 2023.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Even though the pay is lower and hours longer - at his other
| companies they offered stock options that at least 20x'd over
| the past 10 years at SpaceX and Tesla.
|
| If the employees at Twitter think under Musk's leadership that
| they can grow the company to 200 billion or more - then yea
| it'd be worth staying to collect stock that no one else can get
| now.
|
| Hopefully they're giving the remaining employees generous stock
| awards for staying. With the user base they have there's no
| reason they can't grow the company a lot with the the right
| strategy.
|
| Musk has already discussed attacking YouTube directly and it
| sounds like he wants to expand into other social network
| niches. The whole X.com thing.
|
| A lot of Twitter employees could come out pretty wealthy if
| successful. If it were me I'd stick around a year at least to
| see which way this whole thing is going.
| joshe wrote:
| Would be wonderfully ironic if Elon saves downtown SF.
| solardev wrote:
| Maybe Musk just likes explosions. Rockets, batteries, Twitter...
| jdcaron wrote:
| This guy is a car salesman, no wonder he wants to force an in
| office working policy.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs
| 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive:
|
| > That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to
| develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge
| props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue,
| there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming
| economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be
| subscription.
|
| Is that even remotely feasible? Based on the commentary I've
| seen, Twitter Blue is going to be a drop in the bucket compared
| to their total revenue.
| rbetts wrote:
| Q2 revenue was $1.18B on 237.8M mDAU. If they want $590M (50%)
| in subscription revenue, that's 24.5M subscriptons @ $24 per
| quarter. So they'd need to convert about 10% of the reported
| mDAU to subscribers?
|
| https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-s...
| apendleton wrote:
| I don't think what he's proposing is to replace any ad
| revenue -- he's trying to grow revenue and take a company
| currently in the red into the black. I think he means to keep
| all the ad revenue, and then add that much again in
| subscription revenue. So: 20%, I guess? Or even more to make
| up for advertiser attrition? Which seems like... a ton.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Just to service the debt that Musk loaded them with as part of
| the purchase, they're going to have to add a billion a year.
| They had 5 billion in revenue last year. So that would be three
| billion a year in subscriptions.
|
| Given that Twitter had about half a billion users hat's six
| dollars per user in subscriptions to see six dollars worth of
| surveillance capitalism per year. Does that seem likely?
| colinloretz wrote:
| not likely, subscriptions are very mature on YouTube and still
| only make up a tiny percentage of revenue. MKBHD did a good
| video breaking this down across other social networks
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- I was more scared of the "upcoming economic downturn" - how
| bad are people expecting this recession to be? --
| jacquesc wrote:
| I think it could only possibly work if "subscriptions" were not
| directly to twitter, but to other twitter subscribers. Premium
| follows to content creators, charities, individual journalists,
| or politicians. Where you get some "club only" content and
| interaction. And Twitter takes a piece off the top
| klodolph wrote:
| Revenue of $5bn. Let's say that you burn half of it down, so
| you're making $2.5bn with ads, and $2.5bn with subscriptions.
| If there 200M DAU, then that means you want to make $12.5/year,
| per user, for subscriptions.
|
| I don't see how that would be possible, even under the most
| wildly optimistic scenarios.
| inerte wrote:
| The good news is that if your revenue drops, so does your
| share of subscription. In that sense he's already helping the
| goal by doing the first part!
| andsoitis wrote:
| One area Twitter hasn't excelled in is adding new users.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter
| needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to
| surivive [...] Is that even remotely feasible?
|
| Yes, Musk can plausibly drive off enough advertisers to get
| advertising revenue down to parity with subscription revenue.
|
| Don't see how it helps Twitter survive, though.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to
| build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking
| for.
|
| Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best
| developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them
| an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about
| 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So
| our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million
| a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a
| year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to
| interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain
| points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
|
| So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on
| Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved
| that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the
| existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that
| is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features,
| wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than
| acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software?
| At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon
| is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in
| value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.
|
| In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1
| billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
| vonseel wrote:
| I'm just guessing, but maybe Elon really loves _Twitter_.
| Building a new platform wouldn't allow him to rescue the thing
| he loves. Seems more like an emotional decision than a logical
| one.
| jensvdh wrote:
| If you paid me anywhere between 750-1.5M a year just go on in
| the office 40 hours a week I'd take that offer any day every
| day.
|
| I did the same for less than half of that not even 2 years ago.
|
| The problem with Musk companies is 1) It'll be MINIMUM 40 hours
| a week, no WLB 2) His companies aren't known for paying
| competitively
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Didn't need to be too competitive when you had 11x stock
| growth. Will be interesting to see if things change now that
| their stock is flatish.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of
| crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many
| of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Then you would be shocked to learn how little software
| engineers are paid in the automotive industry vs me working
| on dumb VC money pit web apps.
| [deleted]
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Disagree, a lot.
|
| Most people underestimate two things, IMHO. One is obvious: the
| cost of convincing everyone that Muskitter is the place to go.
|
| The second one? You could NOT build a twitter equivalent for a
| billion dollars. I'd be happy to take bets.
|
| Corollary to number two: building it means actually two things:
| one, building it, and two, having a team that can start from
| the moment of finished building it, and continue developing and
| bug fixing and supporting the platform from T+1 onwards.
| dools wrote:
| It would be even cheaper to just buy the political influence he
| is trying to wield by directly funding politicians like his
| buddy Peter Thiel. Corrupting the GOP is surprisingly
| inexpensive for the value you receive in return.
| qez wrote:
| > So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on
| Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved
| that problem too
|
| No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter.
| He would not get the same number of followers on some other
| social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on
| Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social
| users are less valuable.
|
| Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important
| part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily
| replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You
| buy the platforms to buy the users.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| All of the people (or most of the people) that matter would not
| have left Twitter for Elon's new company. Tons of people have
| tried this.
|
| Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off
| the ground and it had a ton of YC press.
|
| Network affects are real.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017):
|
| > "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the
| "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of
| wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale
| disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem,
| App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's
| knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and
| Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the
| top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned
| everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is
| shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not
| have a viable business model."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by
| Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects
| are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as
| the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC
| press is way different than being Elon.
|
| Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay
| businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay
| individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and
| engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think
| it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Go check out Mixer and Facebook's game streaming if you
| want to see how well buying influencers onto your platform
| works.
|
| It doesn't. No one's ever made it work. You need users and
| creators and users are considerably more stubborn than
| creators.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| Guess it's like Zuck trying to force everyone onto the
| Metaverse.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to
| build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's
| looking for.
|
| Two things to counter that idea:
|
| 1. Social apps aren't about features, they're about the network
| effect and the user base. Rebuilding that of Twitter at this
| stage would have been _very_ hard.
|
| 2. Even assuming that was possible, the time it would take to
| rebuild something like it means guaranteed failure.
| eftychis wrote:
| He bought the users not the equipment, developers etc. The
| brand and domain is what he bought -- in his mind at least.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of
| Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's
| extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase
| to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would
| cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done,
| it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media
| landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not the case.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| Isn't one exception to this the case when you control both
| the old and new platform, and can technically just migrate
| what content possible and just replace the old one with new?
| It technically does not even have to be "new" platform, it
| could be presented as "twitter redesign".
| fortydegrees wrote:
| Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for
| $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an
| absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
| selectout wrote:
| I'm always curious if he just set aside say $250k/year (2
| year contract maybe?) to the top 100 content creators at
| Twitter/IG/TikTok today.
|
| Add $25 million to the annual costs and have the chicken/egg
| problem semi-saved.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| Makes sense.. there's a small handful of social media
| platforms people actually use compared to cemetery of failed
| attempts.
| throwuwu wrote:
| The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers
| do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter's brand and
| established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something
| payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans
| it wouldn't have the penetration needed to loop more people in.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit.
| Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter
| accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and
| established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to
| support the platform.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Elon reported on Nov 7 that Twitter usage was at an all
| time high. Do you believe that is dishonest? Or do you
| believe this uptick will be short-lived?
| bb88 wrote:
| So let's say we're being generous and say Elon has 10M
| hardcore followers.
|
| So $44B/10M = $4.4k per follower on Twitter. If he can sell
| each of those a Tesla it might be fine.
|
| I'm beginning to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about
| in not a good way though. Consumer Reports is reporting a
| ton of reliability problems as Tesla scales up [1]. And
| Ford/GM is not far behind in their electric offerings
| either.
|
| [1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Tesla-ranks-almost-
| dead-....
| awinder wrote:
| Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on
| Truth Social 2.0.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get
| top dev talent lol?
| fredley wrote:
| I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter
| now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not
| something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular'
| engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top'
| talent.
| nightski wrote:
| Top dev talent is overrated imo. Not to mention almost
| every dev thinks they are top tier even if most of us are
| just mediocre.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year,
| if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would
| quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole
| thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a
| billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.
| robocat wrote:
| > Top dev talent is overrated
|
| The problem is that talent is defined by hindsight: "When
| the company was acquired by Facebook, it had 35
| engineers" https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-
| serves-900-million-us...
|
| Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally
| talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to
| work on a successful product due to a successful market,
| we call them talented. If A flamed out due to
| unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be
| shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A.
|
| But technical talent is definitely not overrated -
| because there are too many examples where talented teams
| have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to
| build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's
| looking for.
|
| It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken
| with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing
| about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever
| took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from
| the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are
| paying the price.
|
| We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of
| how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign
| the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any
| serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not
| to or they're as dumb as he is.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I may be missing something, but would it have been _that_
| hard to fail to get financing and get out of it, since it was
| a bad deal that others shouldn 't want to finance, if he had
| started working on failing to get financing _before_ he...
| succefully lined up financing?
|
| I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed
| to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive
| twitter into the ground and throw away his and others
| billions.
|
| The whole thing is very bizarre from the start to now.
| pydry wrote:
| I think there was a $1 billion fine if he quit the deal.
|
| That would have stung.
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| probably less than what he'll lose with this scenario
| uMeanPpl wrote:
| Tbh I thought that was the entire play. $1 billion is way
| cheaper than $44 and whatever he just sold of Tesla to
| keep Twitter afloat.
|
| Jack hyping Elon as twitter's great hope and such I
| almost expected this was some subtle game to get that $1
| billion to Twitter
|
| Now I can't help but wonder if Jack was tweeting such
| praise to goad Elons ego into it. But in hindsight I'm
| probably giving these guys too much credit
| saberdancer wrote:
| Jack was privately talking the same to Elon. You can read
| more in the discovery documents (Elon's messages).
|
| The gist was it that Jack believes Twitter should be not
| be a company and he believed Musk will take it there. Not
| sure I agree.
| shmoogy wrote:
| He couldn't quit the deal, he would have (probably
| gladly) taken only a billion loss
| lesuorac wrote:
| No, there's a $1B fee under extremely limited
| circumstances. There is no written agreement on how to
| handle any other circumstance (hence the court case).
|
| > Either Twitter or Parent may terminate the Merger
| Agreement if, among certain other circumstances, (1) the
| Merger has not been consummated on or before October 24,
| 2022, which date will be extended for six months if the
| closing conditions related to applicable antitrust and
| foreign investment clearances and the absence of any
| applicable law or order making illegal or prohibiting the
| Merger have not been satisfied as of such date; or (2)
| Twitter's stockholders fail to adopt the Merger
| Agreement. Twitter may terminate the Merger Agreement in
| certain additional limited circumstances, including to
| allow Twitter to enter into a definitive agreement for a
| competing acquisition proposal that constitutes a
| Superior Proposal (as defined in the Merger Agreement).
| Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain
| additional limited circumstances, including prior to the
| adoption of the Merger Agreement by Twitter's
| stockholders if the Board recommends that Twitter's
| stockholders vote against the adoption of the Merger
| Agreement or in favor of any competing acquisition
| proposal.
|
| > ...
|
| > Upon termination of the Merger Agreement under other
| specified limited circumstances, Parent will be required
| to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1.0 billion.
| Specifically, this termination fee is payable by Parent
| to Twitter if the Merger Agreement is terminated by
| Twitter because (1) the conditions to Parent's and
| Acquisition Sub's obligations to consummate the Merger
| are satisfied and the Parent fails to consummate the
| Merger as required pursuant to, and in the circumstances
| specified in, the Merger Agreement; or (2) Parent or
| Acquisition Sub's breaches of its representations,
| warranties or covenants in a manner that would cause the
| related closing conditions to not be satisfied. Mr. Musk
| has provided Twitter with a limited guarantee in favor of
| Twitter (the "Limited Guarantee"). The Limited Guarantee
| guarantees, among other things, the payment of the
| termination fee payable by Parent to Twitter, subject to
| the conditions set forth in the Limited Guarantee. [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001
| 19312522...
| eftychis wrote:
| They would have liquidated him -- and that would have
| crashed the Tesla stock (more than now anyways).
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Twitter leadership and board really walked away from this
| with the winning hand didn't they.
| uMeanPpl wrote:
| The first fired employees too, imo. If it all goes up in
| flames those that remain might get to keep their laptop.
| Qub3d wrote:
| My Dad told me a story from the dot-com bust:
|
| To save money at the time he drove a van for a carpool
| service (he could use it for free as a result). A lot of
| the guys on his van were in tech.
|
| When the first rounds of layoffs hit, guys would get on
| at the end of the day and they would talk about their
| severance. The first question in response to "I got laid
| off" was "What's your severance?"
|
| At one point deep into 2002, he remembered a change. Now
| guys were getting on the van with all their stuff in a
| box. He played the game, even though he wasn't in tech,
| and asked one of the guys with a box, "What's your
| severance?"
|
| He just got a flat look in response.
| ksherlock wrote:
| If you look at the timeline, he made an unsolicited offer
| with no details, the twitter BoD instituted a poison pill,
| then he lined up all the financing and made a second
| ("final") offer with very specific details about the
| funding (including commitment letters for the loans), then
| he negotiated to buy it with no due diligence, etc. Morgan
| Stanley, etc, already agreed to loan the money back in
| April. At the time, the big banks did want to finance it!
| admn2 wrote:
| Why did he not do any due diligence before buying? It's
| not like he had FOMO he was going to miss out. That's the
| part I don't understand in all of this.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| No idea, but he seems like the kind of guy whose ego
| can't suffer from the embarrassment of being called out.
| It wouldn't surprise me at all if he did all this just
| because he was incapable of losing face for acting like
| an idiot. Joke's on him though.
| runarberg wrote:
| When you are this rich, stuff like this doesn't matter. Even
| if he lost all the 40 Bn USD means he'll still be the richest
| person on earth, that's how much money he has. To keep with
| the poker analogy, his "bluff" involved only 40 poker chips,
| but he has 200 after the fact, while his "opponents" have 1
| or 2 each.
|
| But in the end, money will always end up in his hands no
| matter what he does. When you are this rich, you'll always
| end up making money.
| ibn_khaldun wrote:
| You are neglecting to consider the other fundamental needs
| of a filthy rich person like an Elon Musk, two that are of
| greater priority than sheer wealth even, name and fame.
| wingworks wrote:
| Allot of how Elon handled the layoffs from what's public
| doesn't sound ideal. But also idk how many of those people
| would've had a job at twitter for much longer anyway. We get
| a post in HN every other day at the moment of x company
| laying of 1000 of people.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Twitter was almost certain to see layoffs had Musk not
| bought it, but they'd have been slower, more considered,
| less harmful, and probably smaller because the company
| didn't have a ludicrous leveraged buyout $1bn annual debt
| bill.
|
| The way things are going now there's an increasingly real
| possibility that Twitter may not exist in a few months,
| putting the jobs of the other 3000 or so employees at risk
| too. Not to mention all the people who used Twitter to make
| a living.
|
| The destruction of lives and so much value for one man's
| ego is astounding.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > there's an increasingly real possibility that Twitter
| may not exist in a few months,
|
| If you honestly think that's a real possibility, how do
| you see that actually happening?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| They are seeing a massive advertiser exodus, have
| apparently created potential new FTC/DOJ issues regarding
| the existing privacy consent decree with their desire to
| push-down responsibilty to facilitate velocity, are
| seeing policy churn that undermines trust, and their big
| revenue ideas are becoming a for-pay social network and
| payment processor with that trust deficit.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| Musky himself has said that bankruptcy is a possibility:
|
| https://www.axios.com/2022/11/10/musk-twitter-email-
| arduous-...
|
| Strangely, it's the same story as linked in OP, but
| Bloomberg doesn't include that detail
| llamataboot wrote:
| No advertisers? Catastrophic server failures? Elon just
| pulls the plug?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got
| bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech
| thing is just marketing.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| My cynical guess:
|
| Elon Musk's big plan is simply to build a huge personality
| cult around him and Twitter is perfect for that.
|
| It's not enough for him to be exceptionally rich, he wants
| to be _adulated_.
|
| He wants to hear he is the new Steve Jobs, that he is
| better than Leonardo Da Vinci. That he got this right, we
| are living in a computer simulation.
|
| Why do everyone keeps assuming he is playing 10 dimensional
| chess?
|
| Have you seen his dumb tunnel under Las Vegas? Why would a
| brilliant engineer build that? What's the big plan here?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I mean, I don't think the dumb tunnel under vegas is good
| evidence of not being a brilliant engineer. He obviously
| has a very deep understanding of engineering type shit as
| well as engineering management[0][1]. He's got engineer
| brain! Engineer brain can make you do a lot of really
| stupid shit even if you're a great engineer.
|
| That being said I absolutely _don 't_ think he's playing
| 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his
| head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant
| engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at
| the same time.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| To be honest the thing that worries me most about the
| dumb Las Vegas tunnel, is not that he had a bad idea. I
| have bad ideas all the time too. But my bad ideas don't
| turn into dumb tunnels because I have limited resources
| (he doesn't) and because I have feedback from the harsh
| reality.
|
| The dumb tunnel makes me think Elon Musk is fully
| insulated from reality. Nobody around him dared to tell
| him the tunnel was dumb. And or he didn't listened.
|
| Fast forward today where he decides on a whim that every
| engineer must stop working remotely and must instead work
| like crazy to satisfy his ego. And here again the
| feedback from reality seems minimal on him.
|
| I think and I hope that the good engineers at Twitter are
| making plans to leave this terrible boss ASAP.
| ben_w wrote:
| Back when the Boring Company was new, although I thought
| it was weird even then, I had enough trust in his
| business vision to be motivated to guess how it might
| fit.
|
| Best I got was, experience with tunnel boring machines
| would be really useful for Marian and Lunar colonies.
|
| Now though? Well, now I think it was always merely the
| billionaire equivalent of me picking up Blender,
| modelling half a spaceship before I get bored, quit, and
| forget I even have Blender installed for another six
| months.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| That's a great way to put it.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I suspect it's all about his process and he doesn't
| really have a grand plan but a general strategy. He is
| really good in few things and as a result he thrives in
| precarious situations. IMHO, he really believes in
| Twitters potential in he is trying to find the solution
| to dig himself out of the pit he jumped in.
|
| Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were
| saying about running a social media? I think His hands on
| micromanager approach is good for finding a solution
| through iteration. Of course, if a solution exists.
|
| It is like going back to the basics and look at the
| situation with a fresh eye and understand why something
| doesn't work, create a solution and try again if the
| solution doesn't work.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were
| saying about running a social media? I think His hands on
| micromanager approach is good for finding a solution
| through iteration.
|
| This works well in a startup whose business position is a
| kind of blank slate and you have lots of VC money
| compared to you run rate, but when your existing business
| relies on established trust in the market, uninformed
| blind rapid iteration that harms brand position and
| existing relationships adds additional problem while you
| are exploring the solution space for the preexisting
| problem.
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| Your theory is the one that seems most plausible to me.
| Pushed into a decision he thought he could back out of and
| now trying to fix it the best way he sees fit.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| He doesn't want to build a better twitter.
|
| He wants to _own this twitter_.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I wonder if he'll get himself retroactive added as a founder
| of twitter in the past just like tesla.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| "You made this? I made this." https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4
| siquick wrote:
| This is a pretty naive take on how hard it is to build a
| application that relies on any kind of network effect,
| activation, and retention, not to mention a complex ad platform
| that needs CS/Sales to even get it off the ground.
| [deleted]
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That money would get you a very robust prototype, but getting
| to scale requires building a lot of random other features that
| most users aren't aware of, plus being around long enough with
| half-decent community management to acquire users.
|
| Companies like Twitter don't get big for no reason. Yes,
| there's obviously some bloat, but a lot of it's just random
| 'non-core' features that still need to get done.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating
| expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You
| can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that
| could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview
| ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points,
| problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
|
| No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media
| site than just building it. You can't just build and ship.
|
| Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former,
| good luck amassing any substantial amount of users.
|
| For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is
| important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed
| along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia
| enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a
| cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without
| users, you can not run an ad-based social network either.
|
| Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on
| why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter
| wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other
| twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
| autospeaker22 wrote:
| Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the
| elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely
| build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40
| million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could
| build something pretty amazing at that rate.
|
| Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is
| talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current
| reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested
| in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and
| removing bad apples.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon
| is talking about publicly shaming them.
|
| Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way,
| he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon
| was told by industry leaders what the issues with his
| approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon
| claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according
| to industry leaders, that is not true [1].
|
| > Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly
| from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning
| us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND
| SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you're committed to moderation,
| but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!
|
| > Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups,
| they are being compelled by established principles around
| the types of companies they can do business with. These
| principles include an assessment of the platforms
| commitment to brand safety and suitability.
|
| So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the
| post I linked to.
|
| > He could've invested in building technology from scratch
| to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
|
| Probably no. Read the post in the comment above.
|
| Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one
| thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying
| and categorizing it is a whole different thing.
|
| Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism
| [3].
|
| His tweets:
|
| > Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for
| violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a
| clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few
| more weeks
|
| > Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL ,
| @YaelEisenstat , @rashadrobinson , @JGo4Justice ,
| @normanlschen , @DerrickNAACP , @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch &
| @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat
| hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies
|
| As for this one:
|
| > How is his current reality any better than starting
| fresh.
|
| He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to
| spend money on growth.
|
| [1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-
| by-to...
|
| [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-
| brands-...
|
| [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
| news/right-wi...
| VLM wrote:
| Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software
| engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a
| signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even
| operate, internally, at least going forward.
|
| You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote
| it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of
| employees.
|
| Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or
| electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of
| course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to
| think.
|
| What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data
| around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers.
| And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking
| that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or
| what the competitors do.
|
| All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a
| value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy
| employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only
| question is timing, is he just right or too early?
|
| Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer
| employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to
| become the new Detroit.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Interesting strategic window: You can 't innovate and
| software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe
| this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and
| maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward._
|
| Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're
| based on very simple ideas and features and network effects.
| They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with
| one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no
| innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or
| creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so
| on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the
| innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?
|
| While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this
| move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out
| so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are
| likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies.
| This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal
| digging to make room for new "top performers".
|
| I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to
| 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the
| environment Musk has created? I've seen no upside to
| employees offered, only brutal management and benefit
| reduction with a promise of hard work for less.
| boole1854 wrote:
| Musk attracts engineers by selling a vision. Reusable
| rockets to make humanity an interstellar species. Electric
| vehicles to free humanity from fossil fuels. Humanoid
| robots. Neuralink. And on it goes.
|
| For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is
| important to the future of civilization to have a common
| digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be
| debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to
| violence". [1]
|
| That might not be your cup of tea, or you might believe
| Musk is too petulant a leader to bring that vision to
| fruition. But it is an aspiration that will make _some_
| people excited and willing to put in the hard work Musk is
| demanding.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728
| d23 wrote:
| > For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is
| important to the future of civilization to have a common
| digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be
| debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to
| violence". [1]
|
| Musk seems like one of the people least capable on earth
| of having a debate in a healthy manner.
| rurp wrote:
| >For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is
| important to the future of civilization to have a common
| digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be
| debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to
| violence".
|
| Unless you make fun of the owner, that gets you banned
| ASAP.
|
| Also, I don't think most people associate a massive
| increase in hate speech and harassment with a healthy
| town square. Threatening paying customers who show any
| reticence is an "interesting" way to grow a business.
| It's early still, but this has basically been the vision
| pitch so far.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the
| environment Musk has created?
|
| same reason people worked for id software or other
| companies with grueling cultures. Because working with
| people who are excited about what they do and who are
| fiercely loyal is great. It's not even really about Musk,
| it's what has always drawn people to hard work.
| hiq wrote:
| Why would it be any different from his other companies? I
| wouldn't apply, but if some people are willing to work at
| Tesla, surely some are also willing to work at Musk-
| Twitter?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Because Twitter isn't building space ships or changing
| transportation, and the expected culture and benefits of
| a software media company vs manufacturing company are
| very different.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I agree, high performers can actually damage innovation by
| stopping it. Since they own major systems, they control how
| and what gets done.
| CrimpCity wrote:
| > What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?
|
| They basically stole clubhouses' thunder with spaces and tbh
| clubhouse has lost a lot of it's shine.
|
| Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but
| they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working
| for them. I'd say the execution still counts as being
| innovative.
| jansan wrote:
| _What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?_
|
| Bootstrap
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Past decade. Bootstrap is 11 years old.
| ok123456 wrote:
| It still gets updates.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't think Twitter has had anything to do with
| Bootstrap for a significantly long time. fat and mdo left
| twitter 10 years ago.
| mrits wrote:
| That is kind of the opposite of innovating, no? The idea
| that the company is depending on prior innovation? Unless
| you are saying the updates contain innovation.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Setting aside the timeframe.
|
| Bootstrap is not a revenue generating function for them.
| jansan wrote:
| I admit I had the timeframe wrong, but whether it
| generates revenue was not part of the question.
| petsormeat wrote:
| Can't tell if this is snark, but gotta hand it to the
| Twitter Bootstrap project for making off-the-shelf CSS
| libraries acceptable.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| They launched the predecessor to the current hottest social
| media app but killed it before it could gain any popularity.
| So that's a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > They launched
|
| They bought Vine. Story still holds though.
| code_duck wrote:
| Twitter acquired Vine before Vine launched.
| antisthenes wrote:
| They increased the message size from 140 to 280 characters,
| allowing people to generate double the outrage with almost
| the same network load.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| What does this has to do with Twitter stopping remote, which to
| me is simply a statement of control freak Elon and nothing
| else.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style
| "butts in seats"
|
| I like remote work too, but there's been plenty of innovation
| pre-pandemic when we (almost) all had our butt in a seat
| roughly wrote:
| > What fundamentally does twitter do?
|
| Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product
| when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content
| farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just
| sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin'
| not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-
| nazi
|
| Could you give me an example from the USA?
|
| > your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to
| sit [near]
|
| The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less
| important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly
| magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that
| happens to get a truck ad in passing.
|
| > Twitter does content moderation.
|
| Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they
| don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking
| scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to
| political stunts.
|
| To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable,
| and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based
| on their views, not the users' views.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Nice idea have another 4chan with less gore
| asdff wrote:
| >What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data
| around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers.
| And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not
| asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the
| technology, or what the competitors do.
|
| The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions
| to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1
| person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions
| about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where
| it takes place.
|
| Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50
| feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the
| lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the
| bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the
| ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a
| third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering
| the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working
| with children are like this where you need two adults in the
| room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials
| maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so
| insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of
| murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to
| change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them
| based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill
| these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll
| to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.
|
| Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified
| fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a
| lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first
| glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here,
| because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything
| already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs
| successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the
| org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint
| your observational study before its concluded.
| snapcaster wrote:
| >Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software
| engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"
|
| what is this statement based on?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Factory production lines
| lightbendover wrote:
| > You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style
| "butts in seats"
|
| This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have
| murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world
| changed _that_ much in the past 3 years that you can lay down
| such a superlative?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Reading generously, I would say you could interpret that
| statement more like: "Now that we know it is possible to
| innovate with an asynchronous workforce, and most people want
| to work that way, it will be extremely difficult for us to
| gather the same quality of individuals in one place to
| innovate if we decide we need their butts to be in seats."
| d23 wrote:
| That's not a superlative, plenty of people had that opinion
| before three years ago, and sure, why not, it's a web forum.
| croes wrote:
| >You really think the whole world changed that much in the
| past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?
|
| Because 3 years ago people thought it wouldn't work. The
| pandemic showed it does.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| companies mad hired to offset productivity declines
|
| so many of that decline is because people can't be trusted
| to workout without being baby sat
| sangnoir wrote:
| (Internet) companies mad-hired because they thought COVID
| permanently accelerated the demand shift to online from
| brick-and-mortar. It turned out it wasn't a new baseline
| after all.
| croes wrote:
| Source? Or is it just hearsay?
| mrits wrote:
| I'm not sure a huge tech recession is exactly proof.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| In what way is the current tech recession related to
| remote work, and not decades of free investment money
| followed by massive inflation?
| mrits wrote:
| decades of free investment money you say?
| protastus wrote:
| > Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate,
| develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going
| forward.
|
| It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is
| dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it
| efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a
| culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to
| move and innovate.
|
| The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture.
| Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| >It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is
| dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it
| efficient.
|
| Is it though?
|
| Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until
| it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the
| Twitter acquisition.
|
| I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a
| Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the
| world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
| throwuwu wrote:
| He's continuing to repeat that getting rid of bots and spam
| is a top priority so that's just straight up bull.
| sakopov wrote:
| > You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style
| "butts in seats"
|
| Seems to me that the majority was innovating just fine this way
| until pandemic hit.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade
| or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals
| figured out how to game equity compensation with their
| Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer
| space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have
| had some big leaps).
|
| A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with
| the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a
| 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their
| headphones in.
| jmiskovic wrote:
| Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of
| operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers
| work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me
| puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the
| carrot?
| muro wrote:
| I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for
| the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And
| if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to
| pay that well...
| purpleblue wrote:
| Also the mission. If I didn't have a great gig right now, I
| would absolutely join Twitter, just for the opportunity to
| add new features and prove that the old Twitter was sorely
| underperforming and that Twitter can be a force for free
| speech, which I believe in an absolute right.
| blackguardx wrote:
| Elon's companies aren't known to pay particularly well. I
| got an offer at one of his companies that was such an
| insane lowball it was hard to take seriously.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| Because the 1950s is the only decade that's a villain.
| madrox wrote:
| I see we're still deep in the "fuck around" stage and have yet to
| reach "find out."
| quotemstr wrote:
| What if the allegedly bad result doesn't ensue?
| the_doctah wrote:
| This will all be memory holed and never spoken of again
| bombcar wrote:
| Keep prophesying that it will or quietly drop it is the usual
| method.
| Exuma wrote:
| sdd232332 wrote:
| Exuma wrote:
| Ok first comment guy
| DoctorDabadedoo wrote:
| You could do the same with your snarky and unpolite comments.
| This is not a place for free harassment.
| Exuma wrote:
| I don't disagree with you sir
| memish wrote:
| What you find out is in proportion to how much you fuck around.
| You have to fuck around to innovate and do new shit. It took a
| lot of fucking at Tesla and SpaceX to get to where they are.
| voxl wrote:
| The cult of personality never ceases to amaze me.
| matthewmcg wrote:
| Fuck around and find out.....about Kessler syndrome?
|
| (I am being glib, but this is potentially a real problem, see
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-
| starlink-...)
| HideousKojima wrote:
| All Starlink sats will deorbit in under 5 years if
| unmaintained, please get a basic understanding of orbital
| mechanics before repeating nonsense like this.
|
| Edit: And shame on Scientific American for spreading the
| same nonsense.
|
| Also Starlink has automated collision avoidance systems
| that make them even less likely to collide than most sats
| currently in orbit, see the comments on this thread: https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/p7c96z/spacex_starli...
| matthewmcg wrote:
| Well, even though you consider it "nonsense" it was
| serious enough to be given consideration in their
| regulatory approvals.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| They fucked around when they were a startup. It's not often
| we get to see the fuck around at this level. It's his and he
| can do as he pleases which makes this more entertaining than
| anything I've ever witnessed
| arez wrote:
| that's the same steps to fuck it up btw
| cbtacy wrote:
| Enron....
| advisedwang wrote:
| Levereged buyouts, charging for features that were free, mass
| layoffs, strict workplace policies are hardly innovation.
| They're tried and tested standard boring-ass Jack Welch
| business practices.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| I like how some people equate "innovate" with "break the law
| and make other people pay".
| memish wrote:
| Do they? You're the first one I've seen who has equated
| those two things.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's good that he is throwing every known bad practice that
| managers keep practicing on it to ensure he will find out the
| correct result.
|
| But he has mixed so many stupid bullshit at this point that I
| expect people to refuse to learn any lesson from it, always
| blaming the problem at some different action.
| pvg wrote:
| _Omit internet tropes._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| benlivengood wrote:
| Amusing that as CEO/Owner of >1 company there's no way for Musk
| to "work in the office". Will he fire himself?
| boredtofears wrote:
| I have to admit if I was an executive and I watched one of those
| "day in the life of" tiktoks from twitter employees that show
| them spending maybe 20% of their day doing work and the other 80%
| enjoying company amenities I might be considering tightening
| things up as well.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Link to video for anyone who didn't see it yet (like me):
| https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| Wait, so you have an employee that can get all their work done
| using 20% of their working hours and then spend the rest of
| their day ensuring they don't burn out and you want to become
| adversarial to that employee?
|
| Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post
| that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low
| performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate
| issue from the video itself.
|
| It's like that quote from The Office where Michael says Jim is
| a lazy worker because it takes Jim 20 minutes to complete a
| project that would take Michael hours to complete. Seems like
| you're saying you want your least efficient employees and can't
| be bothered to understand the working habits of your most
| efficient employees.
|
| Or maybe, just maybe, using time as a sole metric isn't the
| best way to evaluate employee effectiveness or efficiency.
| boredtofears wrote:
| You're missing several other options:
|
| B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance
| in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves
| are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are
| therefore meaningless.
|
| C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.
|
| My hunch is that its a combination of these two.
|
| I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work
| completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more
| than 20% of your work week.
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| I am not missing those options at all. It's just that the
| video is not the issue nor the way time can be spent at the
| company. If your metrics for evaluating performance is
| wrong that should be addressed before becoming adversarial
| to your employees based on a flawed perception.
|
| And if there isn't enough work to justify a FTE, then again
| your metrics are bad. The forecast was not accurate enough.
| And the only way to know if that's true or not is to fix
| the formula, do the math again, and figure out the truth.
|
| In both scenarios the employee isn't necessarily the
| problem, or even a problem at all.
|
| And if we take a step back and evaluate the source
| material, it's a TikTok video. It's meant to be content. Do
| we even know if the employee is really only working 20% of
| the time? We aren't getting a 16 hour live stream here,
| it's short form content. The truth of the matter is heavily
| obscured.
|
| It just seems like a bad idea to me to base you're business
| decisions around a TikTok video, especially when it's one
| that is adversarial to your employees. Instead, spend the
| time to understand the reality. Like we might find that the
| employee is actually working 90% of their workday. And then
| suddenly you're making decisions that never need to be made
| in the first place.
|
| > I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for
| work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor)
| is more than 20% of your work week.
|
| Depends heavily on function. Plenty of roles are somewhat
| peaks and valleys of backlogged work. There might be times
| where some employees really can get their work done using
| 20% of their day, but then at a different stage they would
| need to use way more than 20%.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not a twitter exec but presumably would be
| making decisions off of more than just a TikTok video. I
| don't think any of your argument is counter to mine.
|
| It doesn't take a genius to observe that there may be
| some fat to cut.
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| I mean I agree, there is probably fat to cut. But the
| premise was that if you were an exec and saw that video
| you'd then consider tightening up the amenities. And if
| you're basing that decision on a TikTok video that seems
| a bit short sighted to me.
|
| If you're tightening up the available amenities that
| should be based on totally different data that has
| nothing to do with a social media post.
| boredtofears wrote:
| This is just more straw-manning. The video either leaves
| an impression on you or it doesn't. It's really not
| possible to have a meaningful argument about the actions
| inferred from an ambiguous statement like "I might be
| considering tightening things up".
|
| The video struck me as particularly brash given the
| current economic climate.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Why would you assume that a video posted to social media is at
| all representative of someone's work day? The actual work is
| usually really dull.
| adwn wrote:
| That video was recorded _while being at the office_. If
| anything, it 's evidence against the supposed effectiveness of
| forbidding remote work.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Right. I mean, bringing back everyone to the office would
| just be a part of the tightening, which is quite obviously
| happening with Musk's reign.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Not every office is a daycare for Gen Z complete with wine on
| tap. SV workers are spoiled.
| kevingadd wrote:
| '20% of the day doing work and 80% enjoying company amenities'
| is ridiculous hyperbole. even if a hypothetical employee is
| doing that, putting them in the office clearly isn't enough to
| fix it since they supposedly put a tiktok video up saying 'i
| don't do my job' and they weren't fired
| boredtofears wrote:
| It's not hyperbole, unless whoever was recording was being
| hyperbolic. It's not exactly hard to find the videos I'm
| talking about.
| kweingar wrote:
| If we were watching the same videos, they showed themselves
| getting lunch, getting coffee, going to the gym, and
| hanging out on the roof. None of these videos suggested
| that these activities totaled anywhere close to 6 hours in
| a day.
|
| Maybe we're watching different videos though.
| [deleted]
| rgovostes wrote:
| > over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding
| and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.
|
| Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once
| per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would
| greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have
| minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and
| third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because
| some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire
| hydrants to voice their thought, nothing of value was lost.
| bogota wrote:
| I spent less than a dollar one day to automate solving some
| stupid government website form that i was scraping data from. I
| have no experience in that but it was pretty easy and captchas
| are close to worthless for any bad actor with even half a brain
| Balgair wrote:
| Not a bad idea, but, like, Elon's just gonna change his mind
| again by next week.
| geoffeg wrote:
| "We've dispatched a Tesla Model 3 to your current browser's
| location. To verify you are not a robot you must drive it for
| one hour and achieve a better Safety Score than the built-in
| autopilot is capable of achieving."
| Matheus28 wrote:
| Captcha solvers charge less than $4 per 1000 solved captchas.
| It'd likely still be worth it to do that sort of spam.
| ballenf wrote:
| Hopefully it wouldn't make the well-funded bots more
| successful.
| marak830 wrote:
| I can't see a reason they would become more successful if
| there is less competition. It's not like they are not
| sending spam if someone else has spammed a target recently
| lol.
| sergeym wrote:
| There is reCAPTCHA version where the visual challenge for users
| is not required with almost the same accuracy.
| https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise/docs/choose-ke...
| spbaar wrote:
| Use the 4chan captchas those are the hardest things ive done
| since calculus
| avian wrote:
| > some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking
| fire hydrants
|
| My reaction when I get the fire hydrants/traffic
| lights/whatever thing is to not bother and close the site. It's
| not because I can't spare two seconds, but because from past
| experience I know that whenever I get this it's an unending
| captcha hell.
|
| It seems that these days the only time you're given a captcha
| is when some AI somewhere already decided that you're a bad
| actor and won't let you to the site, no matter how diligently
| you keep clicking page after pages of challenges.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Do you use a vpn?
| gw98 wrote:
| This. My attention is worth more than that.
| FredPret wrote:
| Right? The reward for identifying all the traffic lights is
| that you get to identify all the boats, then all the stop
| signs. Wait, what were you trying to do again?
| awinder wrote:
| You'd need to do this TO the subscribers because the problem
| he's trying to address is that now there's a bunch of fake
| people with a "verified" status who are running scams on people
| or polluting news (like Fake Verified Labron James trade news
| going wild before realizing, wait, it's a fake).
|
| So then the downside is that you start bouncing people because
| is a checkmark worth getting captchas? Or maybe you put
| captchas on everyone so that the experience blows for everyone,
| and pray it helps?
|
| Or maybe you just don't conflate paying $8 with being
| "verified", unless you're gonna, yknow, verify something.
| bmitc wrote:
| I bet this will be the code: bots |>
| List.filter isNotTeslaBot |> removeBots
| jmyeet wrote:
| There is a lot I love about the Elon Twitter saga. Scoping it to
| this issue (remote work):
|
| 1. We all know that "butts in seats" is a form of psychological
| control. Yes, there can be benefits to physical proximity. For
| software engineers, there can be benefit for collaboration, team-
| building and teaching. You can do this remotely but it's more
| difficult. However, for a lot of jobs however there is absolutely
| zero benefit to the employee.
|
| 2. This should remind people that your relationship with your
| employer is fundamentally adversarial. Remote work, despite it
| saving tech companies in particular, a lot of money for office
| space, onsite perks, equipment and so on, sold it to you as a
| "benefit". It started out of necessity in the pandemic. More
| recently it became a compeititve necessary to draw and retain
| talent in a tight labor market. In an era of mass layoffs in tech
| that advantage is no longer needed so companies can revert to
| their natural state of seeking control and not offering benefits
| they don't have to;
|
| 3. Elon is a very old school American (ironic, considering he's
| South African) boss who very much rules out of fear and for whom
| loyalty only flows in one direction: up (to him). He is not Tony
| Stark or Bruce Wayne. He's just another annoying, cringey,
| incredibly privileged fail-son. I'm honestly glad more people are
| realizing this as this is not the man to deify;
|
| 4. Morale among the remaining Twitter staff must be (I would
| guess) incredibly bad right now. Rather than extending these
| people an olive branch, the Bataan death march of reshaping
| Twitter into Musk's soulless image continues without respite,
| casulaties be damned; and
|
| 5. For many this will be there first downturn market as you could
| easily have been in the workforce for the last 12 years without
| ever experiencing it. You may have bought into the idea,
| particularly if you're an engineer or other highly specialized
| position, bought into the idea that tech companies are different
| and/or that you aren't expendable or replaceable. None of this is
| true. Unfortunately, people (Americans in particular) use such
| rationalizations to argue against any form of labor organization
| as being unnecessary or that somehow they'll all be dragged down
| to the "average" by collective bargaining. Such ideas are just
| highly effective propaganda.
|
| Sorry Tweeps for all you're going through.
| jimmypoop wrote:
| What are the chances that Musk composed and sent this email while
| working remotely? Very high I reckon.
| memish wrote:
| That's not the gotcha you think it is.
| d23 wrote:
| It checks out as a great gotcha to me.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| so ?
| fortuna86 wrote:
| 100%. Rules are for other people.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Same rule, he explicitly stated remote work is allowed if
| approved (by him).
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You can't expect getting paid and set the rules. If you don't
| like it, stop receiving pay, that allowes you to ignore the
| rules. It's fair.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Getting paid doesn't change the fact that the employees are
| the ones actually making Twitter work. If Twitter were a
| car, it would have an owner.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Some rules are not allowed.
|
| Not allowing remote work is still allowed, but I don't
| think it's far away from being socially unacceptable. Being
| legally unacceptable is just one step beyond that.
| ben_w wrote:
| While true, I don't think that's pertinent.
|
| This is more of a "if you don't like it, buy the company"
| situation.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| No need to buy the company, anyone can always start a new
| one, it's very affordable, just a few hundred bucks. Then
| you can set whatever rules you want for yourself and your
| employees.
| kodah wrote:
| Executives at tech companies tend to live very different lives
| from the people doing the work. Exceptionalism is typically
| baked into their understanding of the world.
| burkaman wrote:
| Related, what are the odds that Musk would be cool with any
| Twitter employee taking multiple other full-time jobs at the
| same time?
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| He is simply doing what he believes is in the shareholders'
| best interests.
|
| If you bought a company, especially a failing company, it
| wouldn't be business as usual: you would immediately set
| policies that make the most sense for your shareholders and
| increase profits.
|
| And, Musk has a reputation to be a very hard 24x7 worker but
| also one not bound by a timezone, let alone geographic
| location, but again it's a lot easier for him to note
| dedication etc based on who actually shows up to work. This
| might be an undeserved reputation, but he is clearly "on"
| texting and tweeting at all hours day-and-night, and he's
| running multiple successful companies simultaneously, so
| either he's awesome at delegation or he's working very hard
| (or both).
|
| (of course, he has other shareholders, but he _is_ clearly
| the majority shareholder and the one who is completely in
| control of the board, and thus has the greatest legal
| responsibility to keep twitter solvent and return value to
| himself and the other investors.)
| threeseed wrote:
| Twitter doesn't have shareholders. But Tesla and SpaceX
| does.
|
| And not sure how happy they are with Musk and employees not
| being fully committed to adding value to their investments.
| Especially given that both companies have serious
| competition that is increasingly in quality and
| aggressiveness as each day passes.
|
| On a sidenote, any manager who measures dedication by
| number of physical hours at the office is either
| inexperienced or incompetent.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Sorry, you are misinformed.
|
| All private corporations in the U.S. have shareholders.
| (LLC's have members, which are similar.)
|
| The executive team and board of those private
| corporations have a fiduciary duty to the corporation
| that they will take actions to increase their investment.
|
| Twitter has at least one major shareholder, Elon Musk,
| which is why I jokingly wrote "the shareholder"
| singularly. He also seems to have other institutional
| shareholders, but it's unclear if he just personally owes
| the money or if they have taken a collateral interest in
| Twitter itself. (The latter seems more likely)
|
| Thus, Elon Musk has a fiduciary obligation to his
| shareholder(s), even if it was just him (it's not).
|
| Like it or not, he is taking steps to reduce the drag on
| Twitter's finances because he doesn't have a lot of
| choice.
|
| After burning _hundreds of millions of dollars_ for
| years, he 's got to cut the fat quickly or the company
| will become insolvent.
| cwkoss wrote:
| > Musk is known to be a very hard 24x7 worker
|
| This is just PR. Seems naive to believe the emperor is
| wearing clothes.
| avbanks wrote:
| I never actually thought about this but you make a good
| point.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| I mean he seems totally fine with it, Tesla engineers are
| working at Twitter at Tesla investors' expense.
| tomschlick wrote:
| Whats to say those engineers aren't taking PTO time or a
| leave of absence and getting paid a consulting rate by
| Elon/Twitter?
| cma wrote:
| Burning out your employees with highly technical work on
| your other company during PTO seems almost as bad.
| Thrymr wrote:
| "Other times, two Tesla employees told CNBC, Tesla
| workers are pressured to help with projects at his other
| companies for no additional pay because it's good for
| their careers, or because the work is seen as helping
| with a related party transaction or project."
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-
| more-th...
| hnews_account_1 wrote:
| CEO is not in office because he needs to conduct business. The
| fucking TRAVESTY!!
| kleiba wrote:
| "Quod licet iovi non licet bovi."
| valbaca wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that Musk is willfully (or ignorantly)
| forcing people out of the company in order to pre-filter before
| layoffs.
|
| If you're at Twitter and can get a job elsewhere, don't panic.
| Save up, apply elsewhere, quiet-quit but DO NOT QUIT. Make them
| fire you or lay you off. MAKE them payout the severance! Don't
| let Musk toss you out for free.
| alistairSH wrote:
| So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other
| billionaires on the other side of the country.
|
| And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous
| WFH policies without much reason.
|
| What an absolute knob.
|
| Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours
| notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth
| their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his
| fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers
| do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending.
| Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to
| have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would
| want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a
| workaholic.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of
| hours he puts in.
|
| I guess that would depend on whether they'd be getting
| employee comp/equity, or Elon's comp/equity.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| My point is, gestures like "you're coming into the office,
| so I'm coming into the office" are simultaneously empty and
| counterproductive. His job involves travel, period. And
| besides, he owns the place.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| It's an interesting look from someone claiming to believe that
| climate change is one of the biggest threats to humanity.
| Better get those expensive developers working from the office
| again so they keep buying expensive electric cars...
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Let's not pretend his goal was to sell more cars; that's
| ridiculous.
|
| But to your point, he's always seemed to have this philosophy
| that climate mitigation doesn't have to be a compromise. In
| his vision of the future we do all the things we do now _and
| more_ , but we do them better.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Isn't the Hyperloop regularly derided by those in the
| environmental community for distracting from more
| useful/environmentally sustainable transit solutions. Tesla
| also bifurcated the charger ports on the market, which has
| slowed adoption of EV chargers by businesses. Definitely a
| more complicated relationship than a surface level analysis
| would imply
| bmitc wrote:
| I saw a stat recently that an electric car removes about as
| much emissions as a meter of road adds.
|
| Electric cars are the most overblown response to climate
| change. They will help in a myopic way when comparing
| directly to combustion cars over several years (electric cars
| only start to save emissions somewhere between them being
| driven 6-24 months into their ownership), but I doubt it's
| much more than that and even possibly a net increase in
| emissions in terms of furthering the dominance of the car.
|
| Elon Musk doesn't care about anything other than his ego.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I think there are many many good reasons for electric cars.
| Climate change is quite far down the list though.
|
| That said, today I went into the office in central London
| for the first time in a while and was kind of shocked.
| While crossing the road to get a burrito I was consciously
| keeping track of the electric cars which went past. It felt
| like every other car. Then I got on the electric bus back
| to the train station and passed the drop off point for what
| must of been close to a hundred Lime electric bikes. There
| is a palpable change and I for one think it's exciting.
|
| It's just a shame Elon is such a, ahem, character.
| ideaz wrote:
| Maybe in his genius mind thats how he will get them to buy more
| Teslas.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Some people at Twitter have remote work in their employment
| contract.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Those same contracts allow that employees can be let go. It's
| not really the gotcha people think it is.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The couple people I knew with remote work in their contracts
| actually want to be let go at this point, wasn't saying it
| was a gotcha -- but they'll need to renegotiate or be
| terminated.
| cbtacy wrote:
| And Musk has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no respect for
| legal contracts.
| gist wrote:
| A legal contract is only as good as someone's ability to
| enforce it. Otherwise the idea that it's some kind of a bond
| and companies or people should or do just 'the right thing'
| is not unfortunately reality.
|
| I would not say he has any more or less respect for legal
| contracts than any other 'typical' company or business person
| (from my experience).
| smeagull wrote:
| Seems like you'd end remote work before firing everybody, because
| now you have no idea if you're going to be able to keep the
| people you thought you could.
|
| If you were planning these moves of course.
| Balgair wrote:
| I think that the NYT article has the much better lede from the
| emails in it:
|
| Due to resignations by 3 top execs yesterday, engineers are now
| likely to have to make sure that their code is compliant with the
| FTC w.r.t. the 2011 judgement against Twitter.
|
| As in, there is a good chance that individual SWEs at Twitter are
| going to be legally culpable for violations.
|
| Even if I am _totally_ misreading that quick lede about dense
| legalese (likely), it still says that Twitter currently has no
| reasonable way to stay in the FTC 's good graces for the
| foreseeable future.
|
| Y'all, don't try to appease a billionaire and get yourself in
| legal trouble. Don't even try to chance it. Walk away.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| More info about that:
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...
|
| > The FTC reached a settlement with Twitter in May after the
| company was caught using personal user info to target ads. If
| Twitter doesn't comply with that agreement, the FTC can issue
| fines reaching into the billions of dollars, according to the
| lawyer's note to employees.
|
| > The note goes on to say that its author, who The Verge knows
| the identity of but is choosing not to disclose, has "heard
| Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to
| take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and
| its users, because 'Elon puts rockets into space, he's not
| afraid of the FTC.'"
|
| > Musk's new legal department is now asking engineers to "self-
| certify" compliance with FTC rules and other privacy laws,
| according to the lawyer's note and another employee familiar
| with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak without the
| company's permission.
|
| > The employee said this week's launch of the revamped Twitter
| Blue subscription disregarded the company's normal privacy and
| security review, with a "red team" reviewing potential risks
| the night before the launch. "The people normally tasked with
| this stuff were given little notice, little time, and
| unreasonable to think it [the privacy review] was
| comprehensive." None of the red team's recommendations were
| implemented before Twitter Blue's relaunch, the employee said.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| burner456123890 wrote:
| Seeing as you're a gun apologist (#99), am I correct
| interpreting this as approval?
| canucklady wrote:
| Twitter entered into a voluntary agreement to avoid
| prosecution.
| mig39 wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a consent decree
| something that all parties agree to, in order to avoid
| going to court?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Asking software engineers to make legal determinations on
| behalf of the company. What could possibly go wrong?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Due to resignations by 3 top execs yesterday, engineers are
| now likely to have to make sure that their code is compliant
| with the FTC w.r.t. the 2011 judgement against Twitter.
|
| I think that's backwards: the resignations by people
| responsible for compliance were due (among other issues) to the
| policy change (which they see as violating the order, which
| would put them _personally_ at risk) that the process would
| change to engineer self-certification to support the desired
| velocity of change, the resignations were not the cause of the
| change.
|
| Also, Twitter apparently has a sworn compliance report due
| _today_ to the FTC (14 days from the change of ownership.)
|
| https://twitter.com/Riana_Crypto/status/1590741781666488320?...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fermentation wrote:
| How does that work? If a SWE isn't aware of the gazillion laws
| surrounding their code, why isn't the company liable when X of
| those laws are inevitably violated?
|
| What about the people who review the code? Or the people who
| wrote the systems that push the code?
| badwolf wrote:
| It seems Musk's new legal "department" is wanting developers
| to self-certify - put their own name on the certification.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-
| elo...
| leftcenterright wrote:
| Looking at how complex Twitter's internal systems appear to
| be based on Mudge's report [1], I doubt informed developers
| would dare certify things they do not fully understand.
| Depends a bit on what entity (system, service, environment)
| they have to certify.
|
| > In January 2022, Mudge determined and reported to the
| executive team that (because of poor engineering
| architecture decisions that preceded Mudge's employment)
| Twitter had over 300 corporate systems and upwards of
| 10,000 services that might still be affected, but Twitter
| was unable to thoroughly assess its exposure to Log4j and
| did not have capacity, if pressed in a formal
| investigation, to show to the FTC that the company had
| properly remediated the problem.
|
| > Mudge knew that the actual underlying data showed that at
| the end of 2021, 51 % of the ~ 11 thousand full-time
| employees had privileged access to Twitter's production
| systems, a 5% increase from the 46% of total employees in
| February of 2021 that Mudge had shared in his initial
| findings delivered to the Board in early 2021
|
| 1. https://techpolicy.press/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/08/whistleb...
| [deleted]
| nrmitchi wrote:
| This is just another way to materially change the job
| position to force people to quit.
|
| I would also be shocked if the FTC accepted a certification
| from anyone that is not qualified and does not have the
| appropriate support system in place to certify.
| Balgair wrote:
| To be clear, the FTC is more than happy to pursue
| _criminal_ charges against individuals when they screw with
| users.
|
| The (former) CSO of Uber, Joseph Sullivan, is now a felon
| because of a 2016 hack of Uber and his attempts to cover up
| the hack.
|
| Joe is looking at a potential of 5 years in a _federal_
| prison, where there is no time off for good behavior and
| the like. In the Fed, you serve the whole sentence (some
| caveats do apply). He 'll also loose the right to vote and
| hold public office, employment rights, domestic rights, and
| financial and contractual rights, plus a lot of
| 'probationary' issues. This will follow him for the rest of
| his life, likely.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-chief-
| security-o...
| Abroszka wrote:
| Wow, if that means that the engineer is personally
| responsible that Twitter follows the FTC rules, then RIP
| the engineers. I would just stop writing code at that
| point. No compensation worth that risk.
|
| And it opens up interesting questions. If I decline to
| implement something then can the company fire me at all? Or
| do they have to prove first that what has been asked does
| not goes against FTC rules.
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I said before: "His company. He can do whatever he wants."
|
| That said, good luck with all that Elon.
|
| Unless the goal is to sink Twitter down, in which case it is a
| brilliant move, there is zero reason for RTO.
| slg wrote:
| Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's
| also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple
| unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain
| percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make
| the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs?
| Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you
| and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly
| staffed. Instead, Musk has already laid people off to the point
| that they are trying to hire back people previously laid off and
| current employees are sleeping in the office. Now he is pushing
| even more people out the door with no control over what teams
| will be hurt the hardest.
| Zigurd wrote:
| This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the
| most sense..."
|
| It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan
| a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc.
| Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
|
| In this case it _will_ push more people to leave. There is
| probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind
| this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
|
| An indication that might change is that the CISO, security
| chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with
| advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
| rodgerd wrote:
| It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice
| what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an
| institution or individual they like, but here people are
| bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter
| as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that
| we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully
| fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a
| crippling social media addiction and an inability to get over
| his ex.
| skellington wrote:
| bmitc wrote:
| > Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free speech
| and wants to change Twitter for the better
|
| How many times does this need to debunked? Elon Musk has
| a long and storied history, with direct evidence, of
| attacking and taking punitive, perceived or actual,
| action on anyone that has even mildly disagreed with him.
| He even tweeted, several times I might add, "Chomsky
| sucks" just because Chomsky said a few mild things that
| disagreed with Musk.
|
| > which includes making it not hemorrhage money
|
| Why does he even care enough about it? Oh yea, Twitter is
| a source of people disagreeing with him. Further, he
| overnight added billions of dollars of debt to Twitter.
| mhoad wrote:
| I don't know how anyone could possibly still believe
| something like that at this point. The past two weeks
| have just been one argument after another against every
| point you just made.
| lovich wrote:
| > Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free
| speech...
|
| Lol, that's some good comedy. He's already gone on a ban
| run of people mocking him. He didn't even make a month
| before showing his true colors on this talking point.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| He's already literally silencing his critics on Twitter.
| throwuwu wrote:
| Maybe you don't remember the 80s but this is how pretty
| much every hostile takeover went down. Leveraged buyout >
| massive layoffs and restructuring > change in business
| model and the next thing we'll likely see is some form of
| selling off assets or divisions, not sure what those would
| be in Twitter's case but it won't be a surprise if they
| come up with something.
| Zigurd wrote:
| There were a lot of awful LBOs, but Elon may take the
| cake. Even the worst LBOs had a business case, even if in
| terms of asset stripping, outsourcing, channel stuffing,
| and other aggressive financial engineering.
|
| When Elon bought it Twitter had no free cash flow,
| existing long term debt, no assets to sell, etc. It's an
| enormous LBO with strange characteristics done by a guy
| with no LBO experience, advised by Jason Calacanis and
| David Sacks.
|
| This will be a b-school case study classic.
| valarauko wrote:
| _It 's funny how people will argue "never attribute to
| malice what can be explained by incompetence" ..._
|
| _... but here people are bending over backwards to justify
| Musk 's behaviour ..._
|
| My issue with arguments like these is that these are
| collective opinions held by different segments of people,
| not some nebulous singular person whose opinion can be
| safely discarded because of contradictory statements.
| mastazi wrote:
| At first this was my thinking as well, but then towards the end
| of the article, the author mentions an "all hands meeting" he
| had with employees before completing the acquisition, and
| apparently he said in that occasion that he was against remote
| work.
|
| Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in
| my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to
| make leave the company.
|
| [1] i.e. almost guaranteed
| cmh89 wrote:
| Getting rid of remote work is an excellent way to chase away
| your best employees while retaining people with nowhere to
| go.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the correlation in my experience is if anything the other
| way around. The best and most productive employees tend to
| be involved and in-person is still the best way to get
| things done and actually exchange ideas. This is the one
| thing Musk is 100% right about, remote work is awful for
| productivity and it's most popular among the "least amount
| of effort" crowd. It's also why almost any major tech
| company after covid is trying to scale remote work back
| again.
| Crusoe123 wrote:
| You do realize that doing something with the "least
| amount of effort" is the definition of productivity?
| Archelaos wrote:
| You need to include the commuting time into the
| productivity calculation. If a person has to commute 1
| hour for 200 days a year while working for 40 years, this
| would result in 8,000 hours of work-related
| unproductivity during a life, which is equivalent to 5
| full years of work. This is the benchmark that you first
| have to surpass. In other words: such a person needs to
| be on average 12.5 percent more productive on site than
| at home to break even.
| cmh89 wrote:
| >The best and most productive employees tend to be
| involved and in-person is still the best way to get
| things done and actually exchange ideas.
|
| I'm having a hard time believing this. The people in my
| company who want to end remote work were the people that
| needed it for a social output. Nothing as shown that
| productivity suffered during the pandemic due to remote
| work.
|
| >This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about,
|
| Elon Musk is a 100% remote worker.
|
| >t's also why almost any major tech company after covid
| is trying to scale remote work back again.
|
| Hard disagree, most companies want people back in the
| office because they are run by middle managers who have
| spent their careers climbing the ladder by putting in
| face time and building relationships. Remote work is a
| huge detriment to that style of career advancement. They
| basically want everyone back in the office so they, the
| middle managers, can feel productive.
|
| There is a reason they focus on abstract concepts like
| water cooler conversations rather than hard data. The
| data says there isn't a problem
| ilyt wrote:
| That entirely depends on type of work. We do 1-2 days on
| site a week and it works well, we can get all of the
| management and coordination done then then just code away
| in peace without interruption. But that's programming,
| some jobs are less dependent on communication, some are
| more.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Changes in terms of employment, like going from WFH to
| mandatory in-office, makes employees eligible to collect
| unemployment should they choose to quit. It's one of the few
| reasons you can collect unemployment after voluntarily
| quitting.
|
| Such a move can back fire, and more people can quit than you
| planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities
| larger than they would have been with just a layoff.
| kazinator wrote:
| Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs
| but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for
| 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you
| don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be
| the less productive fraction of the employees.
| boatsie wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. This is how you accomplish a 75%
| reduction while only having to lay off (and pay severance for)
| 50%! Musk again playing 4d chess.
| warinukraine wrote:
| No, you have it backwards. If you wanted 75% reduction while
| only having to lay off 50%, you make the unpopular decision
| _first_, and then the lay offs.
| etothepii wrote:
| Indeed, that means you only have to pay 25% while achieving
| a 75% reduction. Though it's hard to believe there's a game
| plan here.
|
| However, I have a suspicion that there is a certain type of
| person with low self esteem and high intelligence that will
| respond very well to being treated this badly.
| Taniwha wrote:
| 4D chess? he doesn't have the self control, too busy haring
| off tilting at windmills to launch his damned spaceship
| RavingGoat wrote:
| You confusing 4d chess with Candyland.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Forcing people who were told they can work fully remote in
| their employment agreement to work in the office is treated
| as a constructive dismissal in the U.S.
|
| As this constructive dismissal is clearly part of the mass
| layoffs, they would also be subject to the 60 days notice
| under the WARN Act (or 60 days pay to waive notice).
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| "Is clearly" is doing a lot of work here, and I suspect
| Twitter's lawyers don't share your investment in it.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Then why did Twitter's top lawyers just quit? You're
| being optimistic in expecting Twitter's legal team were
| even told about this plan in advance, considering HR
| wasn't.
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee:
| $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google
| revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per
| employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k
| employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
|
| Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B
| rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more
| industry standard)
|
| Elon: ["emphasized" above]
|
| Elon: Insane potential for improvement
|
| Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>
|
| Jason: Day zero
|
| Jason: Sharpen your blades boys
|
| Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary
| departures
|
| Jason:
| https://twitter.com/jason/status/1515094823337832448?s=1O&t=...
|
| Jason: I mean, the product road map is beyond obviously
|
| Jason: Premium feature abound ... and twitter blue has exactly
| zero [unknown emoji]
|
| Jason: What committee came up with the list of dog shit
| features in Blue?!? It's worth paying to turn it off
|
| Elon: Yeah, what an insane piece of shit!
|
| Jason: Maybe we don't talk twitter on twitter OM @
|
| Elon: Was just thinking that haha
| [deleted]
| lbhdc wrote:
| What is the source for this conversation?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| https://muskmessages.com/d/34.html
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| It took me way to long to see that Like " ... " meant the
| emote on the message.
| diydsp wrote:
| This is an incredible link...
|
| >Day zero 2022-04-15 17:22:12 ( CDT )
|
| >Sharpen your blades boys 2022-04-15 17:22:59 ( CDT )
|
| >2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary
| departures
|
| ---
|
| These people really don't understand the branding of
| Apple vs Twitter:
|
| >Back of the envelope ... Twitter revenue per employee :
| $ 5B rev / 8k employees = $ 625K rev per employee in 2021
| Google revenue per employee : $ 257B rev / 135K employee
| = $ 1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee
| : $ 365B rev / 154k employees = $ 2.37M per employee in
| fiscal 2021 2022-04-15 17:08:07 ( CDT )
|
| >Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k : $ 5B
| rev / 3k employees = $ 1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (
| more industry standard )
|
| ---
|
| hard to tell if this is sarcasm?!
|
| >I will be universally beloved , since it is so easy to
| please everyone on twitter 2022-04-23 21:04:30 ( CDT )
|
| >It feels like everyone wants the same exact thing , and
| they will be patient and understanding of any changes ...
| Twitter Stans are a reasonable , good faith bunch
| 2022-04-23 21:06:51 ( CDT )
|
| >These dipshits spent a years on twitter blue to give
| people exactly .... Nothing they want !
|
| ---
|
| The sycophantism is over 9k:
|
| > Morgan Stanley and Jared think you are using our
| friendship not in a good way 2022-05-12 19:31:12 ( CDT )
|
| >This makes it seem like I'm desperate . 2022-05-12
| 19:31:17 ( CDT )
|
| >Please stop 2022-05-12 19:31:48 ( CDT )
|
| >Only ever want to support you . 2022-05-12 19:37:49 (
| CDT )
|
| >Clearly you're not desperate - you have the worlds
| greatest investors voting in support of a deal you
| already have covered . you're overfunded . will quietly
| cancel it ... And to be clear , I'm not out actively
| soliciting folks . These are our exiting LPs not rondos .
| Sorry for any trouble 2022-05-12 19:55:14 ( CDT )
|
| >Morgan Stanley and Jared are very upset 2022-05-12
| 19:55:55 ( CDT )
|
| >Ugh 2022-05-12 19:58:44 ( CDT )
|
| >SPVs are how everyone is doing there deals now ... Luke
| loved to SPVS etc 2022-05-12 19:59:13 ( CDT )
|
| >Just trying to support you ... obviously . I reached out
| to Jared and sort it out . 2022-05-12 20:00:53 ( CDT )
|
| >* moved 2022-05-12 20:01:54 ( CDT )
|
| >Yes , I had to ask him to stop . 2022-05-12 20:06:45 (
| CDT )
|
| >Liked " Just trying to support you ... obviously . I
| reached out to Jared and sort it out . " 2022-05-12
| 22:49:00 ( CDT )
|
| >Cleaned it up with Jared 2022-05-12 22:49:12 ( CDT )
|
| >Liked " Cleaned it up with Jared " 2022-05-12 22:49:58 (
| CDT )
|
| >I get where he is coming from .... Candidly , This deal
| has just captures the worlds imagination in an
| unimaginable way . It's bonkers .... 2022-05-12 22:51:42
| ( CDT )
|
| >And you know I'm ride or die brother - I'd jump on a
| grande for you 2022-05-12 22:51:49 ( CDT )
|
| >Loved " And you know I'm ride or die brother - I'd jump
| on a grande for you "
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Part of the depositions for the court case. Dan luu put
| them on his site.
| blamazon wrote:
| >This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter
| v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-
| interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to
| text to make for easier reading.
|
| https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Twitter employees: "we're going to vote to unionize"
|
| When you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn't you? It
| brings the federal government in to provide support, on their
| dime no less. Worst case is everyone leaves, the NLRB finds
| against Musk, and he has to give folks their jobs back while
| Twitter is burning.
|
| "The strongest steel is forged in the fires of a dumpster."
| luckylion wrote:
| "Nothing left to lose", except that $160k-500k yearly
| compensation.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Increased work hours, forced relocation to one of the
| most expensive metros in the the world, and threat of
| imminent job loss probably make that yearly compensation
| less attractive in reality than it is on paper.
| luckylion wrote:
| Oh, probably. But it's a great argument not to unionize,
| especially so because the employees are supposedly very
| valuable and will not have trouble finding a new company
| that will pay similar salaries and give them permanent
| WFH. Unions are for the masses, not the elite.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| When end of year hiring freezes and recession jitter
| layoffs end I don't think well paid twitter employees
| will have much trouble finding better employment
| elsewhere.
| mrits wrote:
| In a couple years society has gone from working 40 hours
| a week at the office to being forced to as "nothing else
| to lose"
| pasquinelli wrote:
| in that case it's good remote work won't be happening
| there. it's hard for remote workers to get organized.
| fragmede wrote:
| Not especially. "Hey what's your personal email/phone
| number?" "Here's an invite to this private slack we've
| been meeting up on."
| pasquinelli wrote:
| there's really something to be said for a group of people
| literally working together. for instance, before you get
| the ball rolling you'd like to have an idea of the level
| of interest and commitment of your fellow workers. your
| private slack will be filled with people that want a
| union, this gives you no idea who may not want a union at
| all, or, more importantly, who's on the fence. you can't
| make a pitch to those people on your slack, because they
| have better things to do with their time. but if you're
| all at work anyway...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| If employees managed to organize productivity and profits
| at every enterprise on earth remotely, you're probably
| not right they can't organize a union unless it's in
| person. I'll point out productivity declines with RTO and
| everyone acted like they didn't understand why
| productivity declined.
|
| All I can say is I'm excited to hire the best employees
| at twitter and let them work the way they work best.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| before they can organize as workers, they need to have
| class consciousness, and actually working with other
| workers helps.
| [deleted]
| throwuwu wrote:
| Pipe dreams
| orangepurple wrote:
| Steel is forged in a fire regardless. Forged steel hardens
| with cycles of annealing and stress. Which is exactly what
| layoffs are. Cycles of heating and cooling. Lol
| memish wrote:
| Why do that as opposed to leaving and competing against him
| if they have a better idea of how to operate a social media
| site? His naysayers are convinced he's going to destroy it
| anyway.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| As an engineer I may not know how to run a better social
| media product. My skill in developing software doesn't
| necessarily translate into successful business operator.
| But I sort of agree, if you're top talent at twitter it's
| time to leave.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is not how you win in a rigged system against a
| billionaire who weaponizes his wealth against everyone
| who does not take a knee and flouts the law whenever they
| see fit.
|
| The path to success is voting for decency over power, so
| I suppose we'll agree to disagree. To unionize costs
| Twitter folks only their time and effort. The tools
| exists, just have to use them. This is what a hacker
| would do, isn't it? Use the tools available instead of
| being goaded into some other mechanisms out of "pride"?
|
| https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-
| law/em...
|
| https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/conduct-
| elections
| memish wrote:
| Twitter employees are in the top 1%. They're not poor
| factory workers. They also own the means of production; a
| computer.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| A computer is not the means of production for Twitter.
| Twitter, the company, is in the business of producing ad
| impressions for the advertiser. They use Twitter, the
| platform to do that, so that's their means of production.
| A computer is just the tool to build and maintain the
| platform, not directly to produce value. (If Twitter were
| an IT consulting company, the computer would be a means
| of production for them.)
| int_19h wrote:
| They're still workers. Unions aren't "for the poor".
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Twitter employees certainly don't own Twitter's capital.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tech workers are the new factory workers. I'm unsure why
| you're advocating so hard for tolerating abuse from the
| extremely wealthy (cult of personality?), but that is
| your right. Abuse need not be tolerated when labor
| regulations provide you leverage against it.
| ericd wrote:
| Let's not be hyperbolic, it's a ridiculously cushy job by
| comparison.
| eropple wrote:
| That it's cushy (it is!) does not change that it's not a
| capital position.
|
| Your average tech worker makes company owners orders of
| magnitude more than your average factory worker, and are
| paid what they are because they can demand it. Business
| owners would pay less if they could. Why shouldn't tech
| workers, like any other worker, try to maximize their own
| lot in turn?
| ilyt wrote:
| Yeah, nah. Most of them can easily find work elsewhere
| for as good compensation.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| So could factory workers.
| nunez wrote:
| Let's compare the daily grind of a factory worker to that
| of an engineer at a place like Twitter (tech worker is
| really broad):
|
| FACTORY WORKER:
|
| - Gets up early, leaves late
|
| - Performs work that is rote down to a T
|
| - Works extremely hard, physically
|
| - On their feet for large parts of the day
|
| - Must join (and pay to be in) a union for benefits and
| such
|
| - Extremely fungable
|
| - Paid at or around the US median
|
| TWITTER ENGINEER
|
| - Gets up early...if they want to. Gets out late...if
| they want to.
|
| - Or they just pull up before your team's standup and
| peace out at 3pm
|
| - Work on extremely creative tasks b/c software is
| creative; so much so that some have really cool blogs
| where they talk about the 0.01% elite engineering shit
| they do
|
| - Work is extremely demanding mentally while you sit in
| >$1000 chairs and type on >$1000 standing desks
|
| - Need the standing desk and occasional walk to force
| themselves to be mobile
|
| - No union, but amazing benefits (see laid off Tweeps
| getting three months of pay)
|
| - Generally not very fungable
|
| - Paid several times above the US median, and that's
| before we consider their equity
|
| TL;DR: Come on, dude.
| jesuscript wrote:
| It's not as simple as that. Megalomania is a thing. He wants to
| show he can spend that kind of money and destroy something how
| he chooses.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > He wants to show he can spend that kind of money[...]
|
| Reminder: he expressly _did not want_ to spend that kind of
| money but was forced to after facing a near-certain defeat in
| Delaware court. I wasn 't expecting the events to be
| mythologized beyond recognition within weeks.
| [deleted]
| mochomocha wrote:
| If you're going to correct someone, you'd likely want to do
| it right: he _did not want_ to spend that kind of money
| _after having agreed to do so in a legally binding way_.
| Mark of a business genius who is definitely not impulsive
| and driven by ego.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| You didn't listen to him during the advertisers call
| yesterday. He's freaked out that his 44b investment could go
| to 0.
| atmosx wrote:
| Financially doesn't make sense. It's the most stupid thing
| ever. If the US gov pulls the rag he might go broke really
| quick.
| martin8412 wrote:
| ok123456 wrote:
| What is his stack like?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| While he has so much money that he can lose billions and I
| don't see it actually affecting his quality of life... it
| will presumably affect his ability to raise billions like
| this again in investments or loans, which seems to be
| something he really enjoys doing and his ability to do it
| seems to be part his self-regard. It doesn't seem likely to
| me that he intends to destroy twitter and lose all the
| invested money.
|
| However... he does seem to be really really bad at running a
| company, which does seem a bit inexplicable when he's run
| several companies succesfully before.
| andrew_ wrote:
| These kinds of faux insights are shallow.
| jesuscript wrote:
| Everything he is doing is done in quiet corporate ways all
| the time. Why is his way so celebrity like? It's almost
| like he wants people to know. You can't see that?
|
| No one walks in with a fucking a sink to a company dude
| lol.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > Why is his way so celebrity like?
|
| Quiet, corporate ways don't result in free advertising.
| maharajatever wrote:
| And also don't lose you a significant proportion of your
| advertising revenue...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| That's just his personality.
| maharajatever wrote:
| Personality, lol!...
| willis936 wrote:
| Yes, he is a narcissist and has the power to make people
| look at him instead of just trying.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what conclusion we're meant to
| draw by this being Musk's personality? It doesn't inform
| whether what is doing is good or bad, megalomaniacal or
| not, etc. The list of people doing things that are "just
| their personality" include Gandhi, Donald Trump, Vladimir
| Putin, Mother Teresa, MLK, and Hitler.
| Zigurd wrote:
| It is may be glib, but Musk decided to close a $10s of
| billions deal he wanted to avoid a week before litigation
| because he thought he could flip Twitter for less loss than
| a settlement and whatever damage discovery and depositions
| would do.
|
| That level of thoughtlessness is how you immediately find
| your equity investment under water. "WTF is wrong with you,
| Elon?" is a reasonable question to be asking, but evidently
| nobody does.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| As is your response. Do you have a better explanation for
| his behavior with respect to his involvement with Twitter?
| jesuscript wrote:
| Yep. It takes one to know one. That's how I know.
| seydor wrote:
| But it s not a neutral decision. It is likely you are left with
| the employees who are willing to tolerate a worse lifestyle for
| the paycheck, and you are letting go employees who are smart
| enough to prefer to have more control of their lives.
| chinabot wrote:
| I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin
| some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now
| where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff",
| I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk
| to take over.
|
| Musk is his own worst enemy and can be a douche a lot of the
| time but he doesn't deserve this toxic personal shit for
| trying to sort out the mess. Also as I remember once he saw
| past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was
| the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.
| lmm wrote:
| > I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could
| ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of
| companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest
| do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for
| someone like Musk to take over.
|
| I can sympathise with this, but that's if anything
| anticorrelated with coming into the office - the people who
| work the least are those who make the most effort at being
| seen.
| batter wrote:
| Just in case you have missed how lay-off is happening
| https://www.tiktok.com/@mattxshaver/video/716219248461172254...
| :)
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| I didn't realize the guy in this video is joking... For a
| second I thought this was real. Wow.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The video was satire
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Satire is not believable; this was. So whatever it was it
| was poorly done. Unless you were already familiar with the
| dude you would have no idea he was joking. He even put THIS
| IS REAL in front of the image.
| fragmede wrote:
| To be clear, this video isn't real and Matt Shaver is "Just a
| dude who loves YouTube trying to make people laugh".
| https://www.youtube.com/c/mattshaver
| gavrif wrote:
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/nov/08/instagram-.
| ..
| jmyeet wrote:
| If you view every employee as interchangeable this makes sense.
| Clearly that isn't the case.
|
| What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to
| accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first.
| So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it
| worse.
| blindseer wrote:
| You are giving Musk too much credit. He's a classic control
| freak and micromanager, and right now he's trying to run
| twitter like 6 person start-up that running low on funds.
| danans wrote:
| > Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions
| before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want
| to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to
| ensure all teams are properly staffed.
|
| He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own
| making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select
| based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast
| while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He
| also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it
| makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous
| culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the
| kind of people you want.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Seems like he's trying to speed run employees jumping ship -
| I'm surprised he didn't try these tactics for a month or two
| before firing a bunch of people and paying severance.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| He actually did,
|
| June 16, 2022:
|
| Elon Musk plans to use remote work as a reward at Twitter--
| but only for 'exceptional' employees
|
| https://fortune.com/2022/06/16/elon-musk-twitter-remote-
| work...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's not trying the tactic though, that's just saying
| an idea he has, which with Elon is the sort of thing that
| happens every 2 minutes and I doubt anyone takes
| seriously.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > He has to strip down the car fast
|
| You know what we call a vehicle thats undergoing Rapid
| Disassembly? An Explosion.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| And how do you find "the people carrying the previous
| culture" and other deadwood?
|
| You have to observe them over several weeks/months. But Elon
| didn't do this at all. He is about as likely to have fired
| the best people as the worst people.
| behringer wrote:
| The worst people will never leave on their own.
| aantix wrote:
| Unless they're required to work 12 hour days, 7 days a
| week?
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Even then. If you are a low performer, in this market,
| that's managed to survive to this point? It's head down,
| cover your backside, sacrifice the person next to you if
| you must, and hope you make it through... People in
| survival mode will do anything to keep on surviving.
| vidarh wrote:
| In crumbling organisations, being willing to just
| stubbornly stay can even give underperforming people a
| shot at promotions they'd be unlikely ever get otherwise
| by virtue of becoming the most senior persons in teams
| with gaps above them.
| ilyt wrote:
| The only people he needs to not fire are ones running
| infrastructure. Rest can be replaced easily.
| janoc wrote:
| Except he has fired exactly those. Like the entire
| information security team. Giving Twitter your payment/CC
| info now is likely a very bad idea ...
| lovich wrote:
| Making a bunch of unpopular changes and waiting a month still
| seems more prudent. The people most likely carrying that
| culture are gonna be the ones most inclined to leave over
| changes, and if they are leaving on their own that would
| decrease costs associated with benefits or the increase to
| the unemployment tax that comes with layoffs
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Changes to terms of employment make employees who quit
| because of them eligible to collect unemployment. It's one
| of the few reasons workers are eligible for unemployment
| when they voluntarily quit.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| > He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own
| making
|
| While I think he has done a huge amount to scare away
| advertisers, I expect the ad industry as a whole is going to
| be seeing reduced profits for the next couple of years.
| slg wrote:
| >He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping
| it road-worthy and operational.
|
| But this is my point. By doing it in this order he is risking
| continued operation of Twitter because he no longer can
| ensure Twitter can either properly staff business critical
| teams or retain critical institutional knowledge for how to
| run the company. He is jeopardizing the continued viability
| of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
| danans wrote:
| > He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b
| investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
|
| Both he and the market know that he paid too much for
| Twitter. It isn't worth $44B, but he needs to make it lean
| enough to start throwing off enough cash to pay back the
| loans he took to buy it at that price.
|
| Since it is very hard to increase revenue (especially when
| he is allowing more advertiser-repellent content), he is
| trying to dramatically cut costs while trying to increase
| non advertising revenue.
|
| He can't go back to the banks and the Saudi sovereign
| wealth fund and explain to them that he needs a deferment
| so he can invest in more efficient SRE and content
| moderation. He has to sleep in the bed he made, which means
| show his creditors the money.
| janoc wrote:
| >then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you
| want.
|
| That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter
| after all of this.
|
| Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even
| after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many
| people are going to think twice about signing up to work for
| a company and owner that have a reputation for treating
| people as disposable trash.
|
| Employees are the company's most valuable capital - so if you
| unceremoniously boot out the most experienced staff that was
| keeping the ship afloat and expect to replace them with cheap
| new hires while maintaining productivity, security and
| revenue (which weren't great at Twitter to begin with), you
| would have to be delusional.
|
| Some layoffs were likely justified but thanks to the
| hamfisted way they were done I am sorry for the recruiters
| that will have to look for new staff now. They will have a
| very unenviable job.
| spamizbad wrote:
| > He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so
| it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the
| previous culture as you can and then start hiring as
| necessary with the kind of people you want.
|
| Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations
| like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent
| by virtue of working on some of the most interesting
| problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not
| saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of
| challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more
| appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous
| CEOs?
| abxytg wrote:
| Or -- he's stupid.
| danans wrote:
| I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to
| purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity.
| Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will
| tell.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| This.
|
| He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into
| making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what
| prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where
| he is with the Twitter deal.
|
| So at this point it's all about leading from where you
| are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where
| there are zero good options. Every option is terrible,
| and probably won't work to extricate you from your
| situation.
|
| But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options
| because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you
| know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go
| left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the
| situation Elon is in.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm not convinced Elon has actually considered all his
| options. He didn't have the company for any time at all
| before he start trying desperately to massively change
| things. Personally I feel like taking a minute or two to
| figure out the state of things before slashing and
| burning would be helpful for choosing the right path
| instead of making moves that get reverted the same day
| they are implemented.
| gw98 wrote:
| I suspect this is the real problem.
|
| Stupid people with money can look like they are clever
| because the layer of people immediately underneath them
| actually wields the clue stick.
|
| Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't
| afford the layer of clever people underneath them.
|
| Clever people are either abstracting the liability via
| stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that
| kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with
| designing and building products with the other clever
| people around them.
|
| Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work
| that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR
| baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Yep, it's a whole class of equating X thing with being
| "virtuous" (or similar). Your height, your sex, your
| weight, your hairline, your income/savings, etc. It's
| uncomfortable to talk about or admit but people regularly
| take controllable (or uncontrollable) traits and assign
| value to them even though it doesn't have any actual
| bearing.
|
| "Oh that billionaire did something that seems odd/crazy
| to me? Well he must know something I don't else how would
| be be a billionaire!" - Yeah, that's not how things work.
| What's the line? "Past performance is not indicative of
| future results", paraphrasing it: "Past advantages are
| not indicative of future results". Very, very few "self-
| made million/billionaires" are anything of the sort. I'm
| not saying their lives have never been hard or that they
| have never worked hard at something but I think you'd
| find that, at scale, most people would succeed if put
| into that position (from birth, which is why this is
| near-impossible to prove).
| gw98 wrote:
| Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there
| are many more failed assholes than successful assholes.
| Do not attribute success to being an asshole.
|
| Incidentally he was a failed asshole. All his staff
| deserted him and watched his business burn to the ground.
| Perhaps ironically a big fan of Musk too.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > most people would succeed if put into that position
| (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to
| prove).
|
| It's actually very easy to disprove. There are 22 million
| millionaires in the US. There are 720 billionaires. That
| gives you a 0.003% chance of going from millionaire tier
| to billionaire.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled
| into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead
| rocket designer at spaceX, built both companies into
| unlikely leaders in their industry with powerful people
| trying to crush them all the way, while being a total
| idiot.
|
| A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very
| good at leading a company to build actual hardware that
| has to solve hard physics problems. At twitter the
| primary challenge is managing people, and he is autistic
| and has no idea how to do this. He has no idea how normal
| people experience or use twitter, no idea how his tweets
| are felt by people, no idea how his employees feel about
| him etc.
|
| all of these are things that don't matter when building a
| rocket or a car, while understanding people and politics
| is the ONLY thing that matters at twitter.
| poszlem wrote:
| What's stupid is people thinking that someone who
| successfully rules over some of the most influential
| companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those
| people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where
| in reality they just mean "I don't like them".
|
| [1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would
| actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually
| be cleverer than average. Some applies to blood-thirsty
| CEOs.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Success is not really a measure of intelligence. I
| actually think Elon is likely quite intelligent but a lot
| of success is determined by luck, ambition and attitude
| rather than pure intelligence. I definitely do not think
| Donald Trump is very intelligent, but he has undoubtedly
| been very successful.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Been saying this forever. It's never wise to call your
| enemies stupid, it makes it considerably more
| embarrassing when you lose to a idiot.
|
| All of my enemies are 8 foot tall, einsteinian, gigachad
| supermen.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| No, it is good to call them stupid. If you call them evil
| or Machiavellian they actually like it and take pride in
| it. To them not being those things is WEAK.
|
| So you have to actually see where they have a fragile
| ego, E.g stupid, bad with money, poor, or they have no
| class.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I don't particularly dislike musk, but I'm happy to be on
| the sidelines of twitter. I like the site and hope he
| doesn't muck it up.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or
| Putin are "stupid"
|
| So Russia has all the natural resources you could wish
| for, economy the size of Italy's, economic crisis, most
| corruption in human history, and is currently loosing a
| war fighting a smaller country with weapons made 60 years
| ago.
|
| Please remind me where is the genius I am missing?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| People are talking about whether Putin the individual is
| stupid, and your argument for that is the situation of
| the entirety of Russia.
|
| The comparison doesn't really make sense.
| danny_taco wrote:
| Elon or Putin are not stupid, far from it, but that
| doesn't mean they can't make stupid decisions, and not
| only make them but double down on them.
|
| For example, look at Putin and the state of Russia and
| their invasion of Ukraine. I think everyone would agree
| it has been one of the biggest military and geopolitical
| blunders ever. As far as Elons acquisition of Twitter,
| time will tell if it was 'stupid' decision or not.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Was it really stupid or was he outsmarted by his
| opponents? Seems to me the White House have outplayed
| him.
| lumost wrote:
| There is a surprising amount of luck and happenstance in
| people reaching their current positions. Even great
| discoveries made by smart people often originate because
| someone was in the right place at the right time. Most
| societies rewards these events, for both the individual
| and through inheritance their children.
|
| Musk may be cleverer than average, but he's also come to
| own twitter by virtue of being successful at building
| paypal, followed by being able to successfully deploy
| capital at impactful problems at SpaceX and Tesla. While
| impressive achievements, these achievements do not imply
| that Musk will be successful at Twitter. He's known for
| demanding people to do their best and hardest work by
| pointing them at seamingly impossible but impactful
| problems.
|
| Will rescuing a failing social network motivate people in
| the same way? I don't think so. I'd probably be willing
| to work 60+ hours a week for average pay to solve global
| warming (TSLA) or colonize Mars (SpaceX) - I wouldn't be
| willing to make that sacrifice for Twitter.
| nescioquid wrote:
| There _is_ a surprising amount of luck involved. More
| than you suspected.
|
| > being successful at building paypal
|
| Musk never worked for a company called PayPal. The
| predecessor companies that merged to become PayPal forced
| Musk out around the time of the merger. Later the company
| changed its name to PayPal and when it went public, Musk
| had a big payday.
| tomcam wrote:
| > While impressive achievements, these achievements do
| not imply that Musk will be successful at Twitter.
|
| Well, they imply it a lot more than a person with success
| in zero businesses up to this point
| jonathankoren wrote:
| You could also look at this person and wonder how much
| acumen he actually has if he's the CEO of three billion
| dollar companies simultaneously and still has time smoke
| blunts on podcasts. Usually CEO is a full-time job, but
| for him?
|
| Maybe he's just never sleeps. Maybe the real work is
| being done by others ( _cough_ Shotwell _cough_ ) and
| he's just takes the credit ( _cough_ Tesla founder
| _cough_ ). Or maybe, just maybe, CEO just isn't that hard
| of a job?
| maharajatever wrote:
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I wouldn't want to work for Twitter w/o remote work, but
| I don't think he's _stupid_.
| [deleted]
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Putin's and Musk's massive ego and narcissism will be
| their downfall.
|
| By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact
| opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more
| united than ever and more Russia border countries are
| going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed
| Russian economy. Tell me how that's not stupid?
|
| I don't even have to go into Musk's actions. He massively
| overpaid for Twitter and to service the loan he has to
| pay $1bn a year. Even if he'd cut all his staff and
| millions would subscribe to Twitter blue - that wouldn't
| be enough to service the loan. Plus tons of advertisers
| left the platform because he's a loose canon spewing
| conspiracy theories. How is this not stupid?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact
| opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more
| united than ever and more Russia border countries are
| going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed
| Russian economy. Tell me how that 's not stupid?_
|
| But he likely saw the alternative as Ukraine in NATO,
| colour revolutions spreading to Russia, and ending up
| like Gadaffi (whose gruesome death he was said to have
| watched on video over and over again).
|
| Probably he regrets not doing it sooner, when the
| Ukranian military was in much worse shape.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The smartest man in the world can still make mistakes.
| epgui wrote:
| Yes, but does that mean the smartest man in the world is
| stupid?
| RavingGoat wrote:
| He comes across as average to slightly above average IQ
| so he's not stupid. Definitely not a genius though. Just
| a really, really great self promoter who likes to take
| credit for other people's work.
| whydoyoucare wrote:
| US typically uses pretty strong adjectives. Like my kid
| keeps on "hating" everything, and there are no shades of
| gray. Maybe that's how you are using "stupid"? Haha.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to
| speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have
| simply wasted money and time.
|
| I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team
| quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to
| fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get
| back up to speed.
| danans wrote:
| > Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up
| to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have
| simply wasted money and time.
|
| Yes, he's probably screwed either way. Sucks that others
| are getting screwed as a result of his choices.
| gnaritas99 wrote:
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| A long standing maneuver that companies have is the "your job
| is now in Houston" when you live in New York. This has an
| interesting side effect of basically removing anyone from your
| company who is old enough to have a family with kids in school,
| wife working etc. Basically it "legally" removes the older more
| expensive employees. RTO will remove people also like you said,
| but I wonder what demographic?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Moving a person's office of employment outside of what would
| be considered a reasonable commute is treated as a
| constructive dismissal in the U.S. It is generally legal,
| because is treated as a normal termination by the employer
| (basically: the employee's "current" job is being terminated
| and the employer is offering them a "new" job in a new
| location).
|
| This means, among other things, that the employee qualifies
| for unemployment, the employer's unemployment insurance
| account will get dinged, etc.
| microtherion wrote:
| My understanding (I am not a lawyer, talk to one if you
| think you're subject to a situation like this) is that
| constructive dismissal is NOT legal, and that the whole
| reason this is a legal term is that this is one of the
| categories of job separation that falls under "wrongful
| termination" in most states, even those that are otherwise
| under an "at-will" employment regime.
|
| In the particular case of Twitter, they announced in 2020
| that they would allow "permanent" remote work, and
| reiterated this policy at least as late as March of this
| year [1]. If I'm correctly informed, the change in this
| policy was announced in an e-mail that was sent out on
| Wednesday, and was to be effective on Thursday, the
| following day.
|
| It would seem to me that this is about as straightforward
| and well-documented a constructive dismissal fact pattern
| as you could conceive.
|
| [1] https://thinkremote.com/twitter-to-open-offices-this-
| month-b...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| I am a lawyer...
|
| Constructive dismissal as a legal concept is relevant for
| purposes of determining whether the employee voluntary
| separated (i.e., quit) or was terminated by the company.
| This then determines the legal rights/obligations of the
| parties, including for example eligibility for
| unemployment, severance, etc.
|
| Constructive dismissal is treated as a termination,
| meaning involuntary on the employee's behalf. Whether the
| constructive dismissal is legal depends on whether a
| termination in the same circumstances would be legal.
| Terminations are generally legal, so constructive
| dismissals are generally legal...
|
| I agree that in this case the Twitter WFO policy is
| constructive dismissal. And elsewhere I have said this
| would fall under the WARN Act because it's clearly part
| of the mass terminations already announced early this
| week.
| geoelectric wrote:
| Here's CA's stance, and consider that CA is probably
| going to be the most protective state in the US when it
| comes to these things. Other states with decent labor
| protection mostly copied our laws.
|
| https://workplacerightslaw.com/library/retaliation/constr
| uct...
|
| My take:
|
| The TL;DR is that it's just equivalent to getting fired.
| If you can prove you got shuffled out the door via
| constructive dismissal for reasons it's illegal to fire
| people for, then it's illegal. If at-will would've
| applied anyway, it's just a jerk move. Mostly it means
| you still get unemployment and _can_ still sue for
| wrongful termination, even though you technically
| resigned.
|
| What I suspect _might_ be more of an issue, at least in
| CA, is that our at-will law has a "good faith" clause
| that basically implies you can't fire someone for a
| reason that would broadly be considered unethical in the
| context of an employer-employee business relationship.
| The classic example is canning someone just before they
| get their commissions purely to save yourself of the cost
| of paying them. My guess is that's one reason why
| Facebook, for example, is giving all their employees the
| mid-November vest even if they got fired first.
|
| Constructively dismissing someone out the door probably
| takes away a lot of argument that you were acting in good
| faith.
|
| If they promised these people that they could work remote
| and they invested in property then get forced to move, I
| actually wonder if it could open up the company to
| promissory estoppel (i.e., I had a financial loss based
| on a reasonable promise you broke, and now I want to
| recover).
|
| The times I've heard about that cause in the past were
| exactly for situations where you moved for a job, then
| the job was rescinded. At the very least, that angle
| probably wouldn't look great in court during a wrongful
| termination suit.
|
| (IANAL either, but since I work in CA I try to stay
| reasonably informed of the laws that affect me.)
| georgyo wrote:
| I worked at a place that did this in 2009.
|
| The problem with this method is that many people DID relocate
| to keep their jobs. And then were layed off two months later.
|
| Imagine uplifting your life for your job, and then being told
| you need to find a new job anyway.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I'm afraid that you shouldn't subduct to this tyranny in
| first place.
| slg wrote:
| Well yes, the actual best approach for the wellbeing of
| employee is to combine these two moves. Give employees the
| choice between taking a voluntary severance package or coming
| back to the office. Make it known that a round of layoffs is
| possible depending on the number of people who take the
| severance. That way no one is misled into moving and the
| company doesn't have to be as concerned with the distribution
| of people who refuse to work in the office.
|
| And let's be honest, Musk isn't doing it in this order for
| the wellbeing of Twitter's employees.
| whacim wrote:
| I wonder if there is some sort of tax strategy Musk can
| implement if Twitter goes under? Might be more valuable dead
| than alive to him.
| Ptchd wrote:
| Maybe in reality, he didn't layoff as many people as he wanted
| to? The rest will fire themselves...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was
| buying Twitter just to destroy it for the lols.
|
| Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic
| analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an
| obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn't going
| to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through
| rough economic times to reach his vision.
|
| Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most
| info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the
| last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight
| moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has
| become ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future
| of social media does not involve automated moderation and
| tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he
| is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn't a
| horrible bet.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Twitter isn't going to disappear_
|
| Isn't it? Ok, maybe Musk has a magic wand that he can use
| to make it profitable (which it has been for only two out
| of the last 12 years), or is willing to subsidize it
| indefinitely out of his deep pockets... but I wouldn't bet
| on it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Is that why Twitter is suspending accounts that tweet
| things that hurt Musk's feelings? That sounds like tight
| content restrictions to me.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| Hurt his feelings or impersonating him. I've seen him
| replying to people insulting him and not suspending them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Twitter isn't going to disappear
|
| You seem more confident than Musk is reported to have been
| in today's sudden all-hands meeting; what do you know that
| Musk doesn't?
| notacop31337 wrote:
| I made this comment to a friend recently that I don't think
| enough people are considering that he might actually be mad
| enough to have spent $44B to destroy a toxic business.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The hole in that theory is that by all appearances, Elon
| Musk _really, really likes using Twitter._ I don 't think
| he wants to kill it. I think the madness is two-fold:
|
| (1) he approached this with a "pfft, I could run that
| business better than the bozos in charge" attitude -- it's
| not as if Twitter has been known for great management up to
| this point, right? -- but never actually came up with a
| plan beyond "not what they've been doing." After he
| initially made the offer, he spent all the time he should
| have been formulating business plans trying to get out of
| the deal instead. Then it got forced on him, and he's had
| to scramble.
|
| (2) Elon has millions of people who treat him as a
| combination of Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Tony Stark,
| and bluntly, I think he's started believing his own press
| to the point where he just figures, "Why, yes, I _am_ a
| super genius who can do anything, and anyone who
| contradicts me is clearly not worth listening to. "
|
| I would be very surprised if Twitter recovers from what
| Elon Musk, Super Genius is doing to it; the question is
| whether _Elon Musk_ is going to recover from it. The best
| case is that this will be his Steve Jobs Exiled From Apple
| moment; the worst case is that he becomes Howard Hughes.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| That's a very funny spin to still make Elon look good in
| all this.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > destroy a toxic business
|
| Twitter is more toxic under musk..
| bilvar wrote:
| In the entire two days he's at the helm you made that
| conclusion? Seriously I'm indifferent about Musk, but
| that's absurd.
| ericd wrote:
| Spending $44B to prevent the endless terrible hot takes of
| the Twitterati from polarizing the world to the point where
| the rest of his stash becomes worthless. I like it.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Not for the lols, I dont care how rich you are losing 44b
| hurts. But he is clearly out of his depth.
| drcross wrote:
| Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading
| second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand
| the scale of his plans for twitter.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Is it true that $13bn came in the form of loans and that
| those loans are secured by Twitter, not Musk or any entity
| he'd personally be responsible for?
|
| If so, how does that work?
| mahkeiro wrote:
| Just google LBO, plenty of site explain that better than me
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I think his ego is too massive for that. The man bristles at
| the slightest criticism. Destroying Twitter, even
| intentionally, will provide enough fodder to his critics that
| I don't think he'd be able to actually suck it up and follow
| through.
| dnissley wrote:
| What's the axe he's grinding?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Marissa Mayers and Yahoo in 2013:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi...
|
| https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...
| sdze wrote:
| Interesting aspect. So this could mean the beginning of the end
| of Twattr.
| bcoughlan wrote:
| > New boss wants subscriptions to account for half of revenue
|
| Bahaha, be careful what you wish for!
| jurassic wrote:
| Many technical parts of the company had 80% layoffs last week.
| The people who quit or quiet quit over this senseless RTO mandate
| will push the company into an unrecoverable brain drain, if
| they're not already there.
| [deleted]
| jahlove wrote:
| Hacker News top search result for "Twitter", from two years ago:
|
| Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647
|
| Forever is a long time...
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| At the time people thought the pandemic would be forever...
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| Depending on your definitions, it is.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| It's still killing hundreds of people every day.
| [deleted]
| prottog wrote:
| A hundred and twenty people die every minute in the US. How
| far will you go to ensure that doesn't happen? How many
| civil liberties will you suspend, and how many cherished
| norms of life will you cast aside in your goal?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Reminder that "forever", "unlimited", "never", "always", and
| other superlatives, when spoken by companies, only mean the
| limit is not yet known, not yet coherently defined, or that the
| definition is provided elsewhere.
| wilg wrote:
| This is true even when not spoken by companies.
| phaedrus wrote:
| Illustrates a case where even workers who have a good
| relationship with their management might benefit from a union.
| Management can change; then who is left to hold the new
| management to former promises?
| ben7799 wrote:
| It feels like remote work is a distraction here.. it's more like
| Musk realizes he bought a company that was in a lot more trouble
| than anyone out in the public can understand and he's scrambling
| for anything.
|
| Everyone is all worried about what this means for remote work at
| other companies when it might not mean anything at all since the
| other companies don't have the same circumstances as Twitter.
|
| Also we're all defensive cause we're attached to remote work.
| bink wrote:
| > it's more like Musk realizes he bought a company that was in
| a lot more trouble than anyone out in the public can understand
|
| Or he bought a company and by doing so placed it in a lot more
| trouble than it was previously.
| ben7799 wrote:
| This seems to be the popular view, everyone has been
| irrationally cheering for Twitter for 10+ years now but it
| ignores twitter's long term financial results as we head into
| an economic contraction.
|
| That's the whole thing.. Musk made his stupid public decision
| to buy Twitter before the economic winds shifted. By the time
| it closed things had changed. He harmed Twitter by the way
| the whole thing dragged out, but Twitter was damaged goods
| anyway and has become more damaged by the economic winds in
| addition to Musk.
|
| Twitter was betting the farm that investors would continue to
| ignore the bottom line and money would continue to be easy
| and valuations would continue to be decoupled from results.
| cragfar wrote:
| It's weird how people are trying to divine his actions. He's
| been against remote work at every point. He tried to keep the
| Tesla offices open when the Covid Lockdowns were starting.
| bmitc wrote:
| I think he's been pretty against anything that doesn't treat
| workers as automatons.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| This is a great way to drive away your best talent and ensure
| those who stay are more tired, frustrated, and stressed.
| SillyUsername wrote:
| It also leads to more mistakes and cutting corners (usually
| hidden), so in the long term as they accumulate this will bite
| him in the ass when a particularly bad one gets out in the wild
| unnoticed. And I thought this guy had a high IQ, clearly he's
| not that bright after all.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Having a high IQ doesn't make you immune from cockups.
| SillyUsername wrote:
| No I guess not. His rants on social media have cost him in
| the past. I believe he may have psychopathic tendencies
| because he appears to be attempting to project his own work
| ethic (long hours etc) onto staff but cannot emphasize with
| them, or understand they aren't him/have his
| circumstances/have his ability. His goals are great and
| have certainly pushed our tech boundaries into near science
| fiction, but he really doesn't have the social and people
| skills, which is ironic given he's bought Twitter. If there
| was one thing I could tell him, it's that he should engage
| his brain before his mouth, a little (benevolent) social
| manipulation to get what he wants will be more successful
| before he barks orders for long hours or sacks people at
| short notice. Carrot before the stick.
| shadowfox wrote:
| I generally agree with what you are saying. But:
|
| > certainly pushed our tech boundaries into _near science
| fiction_
|
| That bit seems a bit of an exaggeration to me.
| SillyUsername wrote:
| The reasoning:
|
| - Boeing laughed at SpaceX and their proposed rocket re-
| use and cheap(er) space flight. Now Boeing is the no.3
| supplier to NASA, SpaceX at 2 and playing catch up.
|
| - Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla
| pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no
| other car make has the same level of self driving
| features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button
| click? :)
|
| - No other _US_ company has announced humanoid robots
| aside from Boston Dynamics, which are not for the general
| public.
|
| - Tesla has pushed for secondary industries such battery
| invovation and solar roof tiles (not regular panels on
| roofs). This in itself is not new but is a future green
| environment goal.
|
| - The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har)
| but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation,
| akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
|
| - How many non governmental industries can offer Ukraine
| help with something like Starlink? Can't be many...
| (honestly don't know but initially seems altruistic).
| jcranmer wrote:
| > - The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har
| har) but the intent is there to provide hyper
| transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
|
| It's worth noting that what they're pushing is not
| tunneling technology but a particular mass transit system
| that is essentially a repackaging of personal rapid
| transit (PRT). Although, unlike the PRT system
| constructed 50 years ago and every other PRT system built
| since, Musk's version requires human drivers (as it
| relies on unmodified Tesla vehicles which are not self-
| driving).
| shagie wrote:
| > - Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla
| pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no
| other car make has the same level of self driving
| features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button
| click? :)
|
| Tesla was founded in 2003, and self driving wasn't a
| thing to think about back then.
|
| DARPA had been working on getting the research for it
| underway -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2004) --
| and that was announced in 2002.
|
| I'd suggest a read of https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-
| grand-urban-challenge-self... to get a bit of perspective
| on it. Also look at the number of teams that were trying
| to do it back then and presumably had thought about it
| and done some preliminary work on it even before (
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/11/08/107226/in-
| the-19... ).
|
| This isn't "before Tesla, no one was doing it" it is much
| more a "until recently, the necessary processing power
| was impractical to have in a car."
| stefan_ wrote:
| I'm afraid you have drunk the kool aid. Self-driving cars
| are an idea as old as the car itself, and many companies
| are much further along than Tesla who are stuck on their
| "no LIDAR" stance when LIDAR is rapidly becoming cheaper
| and more available. Almost ironic from the company that
| bet on lithium batteries for cars. The robots are a demo
| gag (much like the smart summon, or the cybertruck, or
| the semi, or ..). The "solar tiles" are a fire hazard and
| the Tesla solar business a total shambles, which makes
| sense since it was just a nepotistic bailout of
| Solarcity. Hyperloop is dead and so is the Boring
| company.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| SpaceX alone succeeding is a once in a century event.
| Tesla kicking off EV for the world as well.
| blitzar wrote:
| These are not complicated decisions to navigate.
| omega3 wrote:
| Twitter doesn't need "best people" - it's not innovating and
| hasn't been for a very long time.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Yeah but if they want to do anything more than struggle to
| fight fires 24/7 they need at least average people, and
| management that trusts them, and buy in for the work needed
| to make a robust system.
| neaden wrote:
| Well it's currently operating at a loss, so if they don't
| innovate somehow the company is doomed.
| ben7799 wrote:
| It's amazing how many techies seem to be unable to
| understand this as if there was still infinite VC money and
| cash raising via stock sale for every company that can't
| figure out how to make money.
|
| If we get a general tech correction as part of this
| downturn things are going to be very different for
| companies that have been burning money for years.
| crotho wrote:
| Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine
| such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There
| was a recent telling interview by someone who used to work
| there who thought it wouldn't be long until the whole thing
| collapses on its own because there were huge teams dedicated
| to simply keeping the thing running.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Back of the envelope calculation:
|
| A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140
| characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could
| handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of
| magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run
| on my 4 year old desktop.
|
| Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need
| more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the
| bet Musk is making too.
| cristiancavalli wrote:
| What a terribly dishonest and overly-simplistic way of
| modeling of a distributed system much less a simple web
| service. found the engineer who, in their own words,
| "couldn't code their way out of paper bag."
| thrown_22 wrote:
| If you're serving 40mb a second you don't _need_ a
| distributed system.
|
| Twitter isn't Netflix.
| cristiancavalli wrote:
| It's pretty laughable you believe your own "math." I
| guess even serving an actual front end doesn't factor
| into your calculations. Hey go build something and you
| might find out what it actually takes to build/maintain a
| system of any real consequence instead of doing leet code
| exercises and smelling your own brain farts.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| I guess you're right, you need 10,000 JS engineers to
| change a light bulb.
| greedo wrote:
| In the same vein, look at how Plenty of Fish has a huge
| customer base, and runs on very skimpy hardware. Back in
| 2006 it had 45M visitors a month, served up over 1B page
| views a month, all running off three database servers and
| two load balanced webservers. Guess how many employees?
| One, Markus Frind[1].
|
| 1. http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
|
| Of course things have changed, money will do that.
| cristiancavalli wrote:
| Twitter has about 10x that monthly visitor number just in
| mDAU. And pof has scaled 100x! (To 100 employees -- that
| seems pretty insane relative the traffic they have going
| by this weird metric of "amount of data served should
| roughly equal the number of employees by some ratio").
| Comparison also seems a bit lacking given the difference
| in magnitude also the engineering problems involved (e.g.
| moderation, botting etc.) Guessing also that creating a
| dating site is not an exercise in needing a lot of
| skilled engineering work given it's been a solved set of
| problems since the late 90s. Hey Verizon has 132,000
| employees -- I guess they should only need a fraction of
| that right since consumer cellular has 2,400?
| watwut wrote:
| "Innovating" is not the only nor primary thing that requires
| "best people".
| MrMan wrote:
| innovating is a meaningless term in ad tech companies.
| optimizing I think is a better word.
| javchz wrote:
| I agree, just keeping things running at that scale requiere
| people with some impressive skills
| omega3 wrote:
| We'll see, my bet is that nothing catastrophic will
| happen as a result of layoffs and hiring freeze at
| Twitter.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Twitter has already been having reliability issues for
| weeks or more, that's not going to get better if you lay
| off a bunch of your ops and sweng personnel
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Revenue-wise I think a fake checkmarked Nintendo being up
| with a photo of mario doing the middle finger for hours
| does a lot, and spells not great stuff. My understanding
| is that advertisers aren't even locking in contracts for
| next year or similar.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I bet advertisers LOVE this situation. They probably
| weren't excited about how centralized systems are, which
| robs them of some of their say and power in the
| ecosystem. This is an opportunity for them to show what
| control and influence they have and basically a warning
| to others not to toy with their demands.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| It's fun to read about this stuff in the news and comment on it
| here and on Twitter but the reality couldn't be more different.
| If you're qualified enough to be in the running to work at
| Twitter, you likely have many options available to you
| (employment wise). None of those people are trying to go work
| at Twitter because there's just too much BS flying around over
| there.
|
| If this keeps up the only way Twitter is going to be able to
| attract talent IMO is by offering massive comp packages,
| because that's the only way you're going to get people that
| aren't die hard Twitter/Elon Musk fans to want to come there.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| All tech companies have been hiring bottom of the barrel
| engineers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
| This is just a realignment where where knowing how to put the
| lego pieces together isn't enough any more.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we
| are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a
| distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it
| anymore.
|
| so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?
| nimih wrote:
| It's possible that a lot of office workers have decided they
| have good reasons to prefer working from home beyond the highly
| contagious airborne disease. I know that I personally have, but
| further research is probably necessary to determine whether
| this is a widespread trend.
| system2 wrote:
| Most companies already realized remote working doesn't work
| out. Hard to admit but it is the truth.
| watwut wrote:
| > so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?
|
| Because we like the new normal.
| c9da4a wrote:
| Living in a city is unpayable, roads are congested at peak
| hours, the environmental damage from commuting, etc
| happytoexplain wrote:
| "Why shouldn't we go back" doesn't have any more weight than
| "why shouldn't we stay". The old normal relies on the
| acceptance of a lot of life-time wasted and a certain amount of
| misery, and people were increasingly unwilling to accept it.
| The pandemic simply provided an impetus - that's all.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Ive got covid last friday at my office. Large gathering of
| people without proper ventilation.
|
| Now my company has to pay me while I'm laying in bed writing
| this as I'm not capable of doing much useful.
|
| Im not a dev but a technician, I just solve tickets throug a
| computer. We never were more prodictive not had so much income.
| What was the point?
|
| I won't sabotage this company but honestly, all companies doing
| this feel like they play their employees because they can.
|
| If they want to treat me like this, then I don't see why should
| care about the business and not try to game the system as much
| as I can.
|
| It's been hard because I have a work ethic, but cmon.
| davesque wrote:
| Haven't you ever been forced into a situation that turned out
| to be better in certain ways?
|
| For many people, discovering the quality of life improvements
| afforded by remote work, that were forced on us by COVID, has
| been a blessing. Many have reasonably argued that there wasn't
| much loss in productivity compared with the huge boon in life
| satisfaction resulting from remote work.
|
| Your comment doesn't respond to the opposing view as though it
| could be reasonable.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The job climate is such, with lots of SV layoffs, that this
| requirement will probably work now where it wouldn't have worked
| six months ago (engs would have jumped from Twitter to another SV
| co)
| slantedview wrote:
| A lot of Twitter employees live nowhere near SV, or even an
| office. The only way to interpret this is that Musk either
| wants to force more people to leave, or doesn't realize that
| they're going to leave as a result of this move.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Absolutely. My employer weaponized the job market to force RTO
| in the same way. They were visibly terrified to force RTO when
| the market was hot.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > Musk told workers in the email that he wants to see
| subscriptions account for half of Twitter's revenue.
|
| Given the direction in which their advertising revenue is going,
| they might get there.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > subscriptions account for half of Twitter's revenue
|
| A lofty ambition indeed. Getting $5billion out of twitter users
| or an anual subscription of $15 out of 100% of the users sounds
| like hard work. However, if you drop the avertising revenue to
| $350 million you can do the WhatsApp $1 a year model.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Seems dumb, ads pay more than users
| kevingadd wrote:
| Even worse, they're offering reduced ads as a part of their
| new subscriptions, so every subscription actively decreases
| ad revenue.
| pelorat wrote:
| How is that different from YouTube premium, sure it's more
| than $8 but comes with zero ads.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Lowering the denominator is a fun way to get to half ^_^
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Lay off a sizable chunk of your workforce, and then make a
| sizable chunk of those who kept their jobs miserable.
|
| Genius /s
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| Ensures that only the most hardcore mascohists remain, who you
| can abuse for huge productivity extraction vs the rest-and-vest
| type.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Or quit voluntarily.
| BryantD wrote:
| As Musk and Calacanis discussed between themselves:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-
| mes...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| " _at least_ 40 hours in the office "
|
| Why would anyone work for this douche? Even if you make a lot of
| money, you aren't going to get your time back later. There's no
| reward for killing yourself to appease a rich workaholic. The
| only prize you win is burning out or getting laid off.
| kisstheblade wrote:
| What happened to Musk's claim "I don't care about the economics
| at all"? Sure seems to be top priority.
| rurp wrote:
| Man, I'm starting to think that you can't take this guy at his
| word.
| wordsarelies wrote:
| This kinda thing is great for the "remote work at all hours" is
| the erzats demon keeping software companies alive. If it is,
| we'll likely see some downtime, lots of typical E company results
| (burned out software folks, higher turnover than is industry
| standard, and much lower pay since Elon doesn't negotiate at
| silicon valley salary expectations at any of his companies...
|
| If in 2 years Twitter isn't significantly smaller (think 1500
| people) and significantly cheaper to run I'd be surprised.
|
| If in 2 years twitter isn't the worst place to work in the valley
| I'd also be surprised.
| [deleted]
| voxl wrote:
| Twitter is going to not exist in 2 years. The financials make
| no sense, and we already have influencers making fun of
| subscribers. Subscribing is not only going to create a
| dichotomy that drives away "economy-of-scale" users but it's
| going to quickly gain a reputation of being "lame."
| dusing wrote:
| Care to wager?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| If, in 1 year (or less), Twitter headquarters isn't moved to
| Texas, I'd be surprised.
| slantedview wrote:
| Also, if in 2 years, Twitter's revenue isn't a fraction of what
| it was just before the Musk takeover, I'd be surprised.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| From the NYT article:
|
| "On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for
| security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two
| people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by
| The Times.
|
| The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief
| information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy
| officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer.
| Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to
| submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which
| is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011
| settlement.
|
| Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems
| before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from
| the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But
| because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk,
| engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their
| projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an
| internal message seen by The Times.
|
| "Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses
| he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding
| obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to
| Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put
| people working for the company at risk, the person warned."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/elon-musk-twit...
|
| This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because
| the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For
| example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business
| model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of
| "free".
|
| Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use
| websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be
| commercialised.
|
| Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by
| "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that
| produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all
| data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more
| fantasy than reality.
| shagie wrote:
| Some other context from a WaPo article -
| https://wapo.st/3ht1DYu
|
| > The agency said that it was "tracking the developments at
| Twitter with deep concern" and that it was prepared to take
| action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement
| known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with
| certain privacy and security requirements because of
| allegations of past data misuse.
|
| > Twitter was first put under a consent order in 2011 and it
| agreed to a new order earlier this year. If the FTC finds
| Twitter is not complying with that order, it could fine the
| company hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially damaging
| the company's already precarious financial state.
|
| > ... The new decree required Twitter to start enhanced privacy
| and security programs, which were to be audited by a third
| party. Under that decree, Twitter is required to conduct a
| privacy assessment of any new products it launches.
|
| > ... The meltdown of the security leadership is especially
| fraught because an FTC audit was expected by January, according
| to two people familiar with the schedule. One said that Kissner
| and other executives had been hiring, despite a company-wide
| freeze, in a frantic effort to meet compliance rules before
| then.
| csmpltn wrote:
| Here's a cool and perhaps unforeseen hypothetical turn-of-events:
| 100% of Twitter's staff give their resignation letter on Friday,
| and don't show up to work. Leadership wakes up to a collapsing
| platform, a 44 billion USD bill to pay, with no one to keep the
| lights on or answer the PagerDuty alerts. Play stupid games, win
| stupid prizes?
|
| No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team
| members". You just wake up to learn everybody left and you're
| left with nothing.
| unwind wrote:
| Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the
| US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't
| really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and
| so on?
|
| I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there
| might be little interest from the employer to keep them around,
| but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of
| legal ramifications.
|
| Just a thought, I don't really have an opinion here, Twitter is
| pretty "meh" in my view. I of course hope it ends well for the
| employees!
|
| Edit: spelling, and fix weird final double bang.
| neaden wrote:
| According to this:
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-
| elo... a twitter lawyer has told employees that their
| contracts specify they are a remote first workplace, so it's
| unclear if Elon has the actual right to force anyone to
| return to the office.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| In at-will states like California he doesn't really need
| the "right" to fire anyone (assuming he isn't firing them
| for any protected class reasons). I doubt the majority of
| Twitter employees (in the US anyway) have any sort of
| individual employment contract which specifies anything
| different than the typical at-will employment.
|
| I suspect though that if he does fire people for refusing
| to return to the office that given the circumstances
| (twitter very openly being a 'remote first' workplace for
| years) that states would view that as a constructive
| dismissal and at the very least those fired would be
| eligible for unemployment benefits despite being fired "for
| cause".
| slekker wrote:
| Even if you can't really quit, you can just pretend to work,
| or "silent quit"
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Most states in the US are "At will employment".
|
| You can quit on the day! It is just not considered "polite" /
| "professional".
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Buying a company, firing all the executives and then half
| the employees is also not very polite or professional.
|
| What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| California is an 'at-will' work state, which means you can
| both be fired at-will or you can leave a company at-will with
| zero notice (it goes both ways). I know, because I've done it
| (left, that is, with only notice given the day-of). Unless
| this has changed in the years since I've left CA/the US.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| No, you can generally just quit instantly if you want to.
| Companies can also fire you instantly (but mass layoffs do
| have some rules).
|
| There's a general convention of giving two weeks' notice, but
| it's not a legal requirement.
| eep_social wrote:
| No. Off the top of my head, my understanding is that the vast
| majority of full time jobs in the US are at-will employment
| which means there is no required notice period. It's
| considered a best practice to give two weeks or more but
| that's a social contract and not enforceable in any way. In
| the past, when employee reference checks were a real thing,
| that two weeks might buy you a better reference, but even
| that has been stripped away now with references handled by HR
| and only confirming dates of employment and conditions of
| termination (this is to avoid lawsuits I think).
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in
| the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you
| can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper
| notice and so on?
|
| No. The vast majority of tech jobs are "at-will" on both
| sides: either party can terminate the relationship at any
| moment.
|
| Giving two weeks' notice is a cultural norm.
| cwilkes wrote:
| Musk: "revenue per employee (1 remaining) has gone through the
| roof!"
| thrown_22 wrote:
| If only software devs had setup a union or something.
|
| No, we're too privileged to be fired:
|
| https://ma.nu/blog/not-going-anywhere
|
| Oops: https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter
| kleiba wrote:
| Friday afternoon: 100% of Twitter's staff are competing with
| each other to find a new job.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Competing with 11k people fired from Meta. FTFY
| jreese wrote:
| ... and everyone laid off from Meta this week ...
| csmpltn wrote:
| Half of them were already fired (more will probably follow),
| and the rest will be messed with for months (if not years) to
| come (as is evident by the email being discussed here).
| Having nothing to lose...
| grumple wrote:
| 370k software engineer jobs listed on linkedin right now. So
| each person laid off from these companies gets to choose
| between 10 open roles at other companies. And that's just
| what's listed on linkedin; most jobs aren't.
| cableshaft wrote:
| There aren't 370k jobs paying FAANG or near-FAANG
| compensation and benefits. Probably about 10% of that is
| paying anywhere near what Twitter employees are used to
| getting.
|
| I'm making close to the low end of an entry level software
| engineer at Twitter according to levels.fyi, and I'm making
| above average for senior software engineers in my region,
| based on recruiter/job posting salary ranges and posted
| salaries on these websites. Haven't gotten a regional
| recruiter offering anything competitive in the past year
| since I started this job.
|
| Also the unlisted jobs paying anywhere near Twitter level
| compensation is probably close to 0%, so no need to add
| them to the mix.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Play stupid games, win stupid prices
|
| Prizes. Win stupid prizes.
| csmpltn wrote:
| You got it, chief.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| You stay home then. I'd go (if I worked at Tw).
| [deleted]
| yrgulation wrote:
| Sounds like something i would love to do. Musk, the peepole
| farmer, would be in for a treat. But those who wish to fill in
| their social voids with onsite work wouldn't be game.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| whiskey14 wrote:
| It seems that Musk at this point is completely unaware that he is
| a walking contradiction.
|
| On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving
| towards the future.
|
| On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views
| his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force
| his employees to work under his total control. He also can't
| accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from
| home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity
| is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed,
| over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.
| lithos wrote:
| Why are you surprised? He wants employees in space and on Mars
| where he'll have even greater control (when employees
| start/leave employment, all information in/out of their
| station, the amount of mass employees will own, and even
| control when authorities are allowed on the station if at all).
| lakomen wrote:
| He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing
| with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support.
| That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He doesn't care about
| the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and
| nothing else.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Do you have anything of substance to add besides ad hominem
| attacks that don't really even make sense?
|
| Let's break this down:
|
| > He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing
| with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support.
|
| Calling someone a capitalist isn't the dig you think it is,
| especially on a website run by a VC firm.
|
| Musk has a track record for returning profit to investors.
|
| > That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
|
| Calling someone the boogeyman convinces nobody. What exactly
| are you warning about?
|
| > He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares
| about his bottom line and nothing else.
|
| Have you heard of Tesla EVs?
| helf wrote:
| > Have you heard of Tesla EVs?
|
| Have you heard that didn't invent them or even start the
| company or even cofound it?
|
| Anyways, yes, he has done a lot of good and _is_ actually
| smart. But it has also gone to his head and the more power
| and wealth he accrues the more it shows. Like with most
| people.
|
| Mindlessly bashing him is just as much of a waste of time
| as mindlessly sucking his knob.
|
| It is all sooo boooooring.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| > Tesla was founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by
| Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos,
| California. [...] Ian Wright was the third employee,
| joining a few months later.[2] The three went looking for
| venture capital (VC) funding in January 2004[2] and
| connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million
| of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million[10] round of
| investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the
| board of directors.[2] Musk then appointed Eberhard as
| the CEO.[11] J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004[2] as the
| fifth employee.[12] A lawsuit settlement agreed to by
| Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five
| (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call
| themselves co-founders.[13] > Musk took an
| active role within the company and oversaw Roadster
| product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply
| involved in day-to-day business operations.[14] Eberhard
| acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from
| the beginning on a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body
| and that Musk led design of components ranging from the
| power electronics module to the headlamps and other
| styling.[15]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
|
| I would suggest going to the source rather than writing
| Reddit level comments.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Getting given the title by a court settlement doesn't
| make you smart or a visionary, it makes you a petty
| asshole.
| TylerE wrote:
| Sounds like your're agreeing with GP?
|
| He didn't actually found Paypal or SpaceX either.
| fassssst wrote:
| EV's do not save the planet. EV's are a way to profit off
| government subsidies.
| vkou wrote:
| Correct. The future of sustainable transportation is the
| electric trolley, the electric train, the electric bus,
| the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle.
|
| It is not a largely-single-occupant two-and-a-half-ton
| electric sedan.
| jmeister wrote:
| What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person
| really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?
| wolrah wrote:
| > What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-
| person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great
| work?
|
| Well, it's his (and your) right to be wrong but that's a
| belief that was already on very shaky ground before 2020 and
| has by this point been absolutely proven wrong.
|
| Unless your job actually requires physical interaction with
| or proximity to a thing or other people it can almost
| certainly be done equally well remotely.
|
| Processes may have to be adjusted to account for remote
| workers and even the way people work when working remotely,
| but almost 100% of jobs that take place at a desk in front of
| a computer can and should be allowed to be remote.
|
| The biggest thing that doesn't work in a remote environment
| is micromanagement, so bad bosses who feel the need to
| micromanage hate it, but those people are terrible so if they
| don't like it that's a good thing.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't know, it seems not much creatively came out of tech
| since 2020. It's all continuing trends started before that
| or living on past glory. I think you could easily argue
| that creativity is down in the industry.
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| What are you using arrive at this opinion? What
| creativity existed in a measurable way before 2020 and
| what does that metric look like now? Who is less creative
| in this environment and in what ways are they less
| creative? What amount of creativity is necessary for a
| business to operate successfully or solve meaningful
| problems?
|
| Not all problems require new or genuinely creative
| solutions either. And it seems really difficult to try
| and measure the creative output by individual
| contributors at any given company. You have no way of
| gleaning the micro decisions or solutions that people
| come up with for their internal issues. So this doesn't
| seem like one could "easily argue" this point at all, in
| fact it seems quite difficult.
|
| Are you suggesting that product offerings are less
| creative as a whole? And if so, again what metric are you
| using to arrive at this conclusion? And are there really
| no trends of this same metric before 2020?
| ashes-of-sol wrote:
| watwut wrote:
| > he can't force his employees to work under his total control
|
| That is because he actually can force them to be under his
| control.
|
| > He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his
| employees in working from home for his workforce and that the
| future of work for humanity is probably decentralized offices
| and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised,
| centralized offices.
|
| I don't think he cares about their lives. Meanwhile, long hours
| in office have multiple advantages for controlling CEO like
| Musk. The people are removed from outside influences (friends,
| family, time to read) and closed in his own echo chamber.
| Whatever he wants to normalize, it will be harder for them to
| see is not normal outside of that bubble. It is another variant
| on what cults, monasteries, armies etc do ... the more they
| isolate you from outside influences, the better you surrender
| own agency.
|
| Plus, people not comfortable with above self exclude. It is win
| win win for ceo. Not necessary effective, but produces strong
| loyalty and obeisance. Which has advantages also for
| productivity.
| whiskey14 wrote:
| I get what you're saying but does that produce the most
| effective, creative and innovative workforce required to
| compete in the technology industry?
| watwut wrote:
| Creative and innovative - absolutely not. Effective -
| mostly not, except in some situations. There are many ways
| how to be ineffective tho, this is one of them many. I
| think that you dont need to be super effective to compete
| in the technology industry.
|
| Will he be able to compete? I dont know. Musk twitter moves
| seem incompetent overall to me. But so far, his charizma
| and money (to certain people) did allowed him to get quite
| far in his previous companies. He did treated his previous
| employees pretty much the same way.
| MrMan wrote:
| if you look at musk and his friends talking about how to
| restructure twitter it looks less incompetent. if you
| remember that he is under a mountain of financial
| pressure you can also see that these moves are for
| survival, not to make twitter more awesome. a decimated
| shell of a company is preferable, for someone who just
| massively overpaid for a non-growth company, to a much
| larger organization with higher cost structure.
|
| I dont understand why he wanted twitter and I think the
| incompetence is in the way he pursued the deal, but once
| one is saddled with such a problem the steps to get out
| from under it (or at least minimize the damage) are
| clear. forcing employees out is necessary.
| watwut wrote:
| It still looks incompetent. Especially in the area of
| treating advisers. And in the way he is rolling out new
| feature, no wait, he does not, cancel that out, actually
| it is going to be done ... nope, yes. Print out code on
| paper, nope, shredder it actually.
|
| > you can also see that these moves are for survival
|
| They don't seem like moves of survival. They seem
| impulsive, emotional and causing him damage.
|
| > forcing employees out is necessary
|
| He just had layoff. Literally, it is not like he would
| need to send midnight eamils about going back to office
| tomorrow to make them go.
| prirun wrote:
| > I dont understand why he wanted twitter
|
| The thing I read that made the most sense is that he
| never wanted it. He wanted to use the buyout as cover for
| selling a bunch of Tesla stock. No due diligence was done
| because he fully expected to just back out of the deal,
| but that didn't happen because he and his billionaire
| buddies were not so happy about getting deposed and
| dragging all their dirty laundry into the public.
| rohit89 wrote:
| This take is parroted a lot but makes no sense because he
| already has a ready made excuse for selling shares with
| spacex.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Cutting edge technologist for the investors, old school factory
| owner for managing people. Makes perfect sense if you're trying
| to extract the max amount of money.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max
| amount of money
|
| Offshoring everything to the third world makes perfect sense
| to the old school factory owner too.
| whiskey14 wrote:
| True, but the fact that technology is going to reinvent
| everything, including work seems to be an oversight. I'm not
| sure an old school factory owner is going to attract the best
| people in a highly skilled industry
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Similar to the formula Bezos is using. They are both making a
| lot of money doing it, just like the robber barons of the
| Gilded Age did.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Not letting people work from home doesn't make you a robber
| baron.
| ukoki wrote:
| The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their
| own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.
| kace91 wrote:
| This is exactly why in my country the law uses the concept of
| 'acquired rights'.
|
| Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a
| certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the
| contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit
| receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.
| harshalizee wrote:
| Curious, which country(s) is this?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Seems like that could just make companies hesitant to give
| out any perks in the first place.
|
| Law of unintended consequences and all that.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Stating a remote policy in your contract and then forcing
| an RTO is basically constructive dismissal
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Most high GDP countries don't have a business culture of
| optimizing for maximum cash in the owners hand at all
| possible costs, and indeed, even are interested in giving
| their employees a fair shake. Most places understand that
| employees are valuable and deserve dignity and respect,
| and have taken steps to ensure they get it.
| [deleted]
| whiskey14 wrote:
| So do you think he'll eventually bring back WFH for Tesla and
| Twitter when they want to increase headcount?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Based on reasoning in my other comment [0] I think this is
| highly likely.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33544756
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of
| their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.
|
| This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0]
| so interesting.
|
| From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason
| Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:
|
| > "2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"
|
| So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly
| driving this.
|
| As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was
| discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure
| (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they
| cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't
| be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in
| quite the same way when public) and then going public again
| once this restructuring process has been completed.
|
| [0] https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Except that you lose your best people this way, rather than
| average/worst.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Or maybe a mix? Although maybe Musk thinks the in person
| workers are the best.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| People that quit voluntarily are always skewed towards
| the high end, because better employees have an easier
| time finding another job with similar benefits/pay but
| has that one thing they want.
|
| The only way this would make sense as a downsizing tactic
| would be if you believe that employees that prefer to
| work remote (enough to the point where they would
| consider quitting) are significantly worse than the
| average Twitter employee.
| praptak wrote:
| The worst will stay and do so with a vengeance.
| JoeyBananas wrote:
| codingdave wrote:
| I've got to imagine that some of their revenue losses in
| advertising are due to the fact that various companies/brands
| simply don't want to be associated with Musk in the slightest. If
| he was serious about ad revenue, he'd also be serious about
| Twitter's branding.
|
| Note that I'm not saying there are no Musk fans in the world -
| there are. But he is divisive, which is a trait not beneficial
| when trying to strengthen your brand.
| kypro wrote:
| I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity /
| creativity perspective.
|
| I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working
| from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're
| less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has
| come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff
| we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm
| building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
|
| That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends
| to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the
| same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the
| office and the rest working from home.
|
| 40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any
| potential benefit of having employees working together in an
| office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were
| I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after
| this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision
| either, but just the general lack of respect for how the
| employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means
| Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of
| your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you
| take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my
| experience is a living hell.
| aperson_hello wrote:
| And the fact that Twitter employees aren't all near an office.
| If you live in Minneapolis, you're not exactly going to be
| happy that you have to go into the office (closest one is 6+
| hours away in Chicago). It's not even a choice to go into the
| office or not at that point - it's an ultimatum of move
| immediately for a job where everything is on fire or be fired!
| schnable wrote:
| I think the purely remote workers were already axed.
| whiskey14 wrote:
| I'm beginning to think that collective distributed satellite
| offices is going to be big. Like WeWork but for companies to
| house their local staff and far less culty. Would help if they
| had standing desks, folding treadmills, three screens and
| everything else for a superb dev experience that is a bit of a
| pain to set up at home.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The US Gov pioneered this. It didn't work very well.
| hnews_account_1 wrote:
| That's called an office dude. Tf you saying?!
| rdtwo wrote:
| I mean that's the worst of both worlds. You get to be a
| remote employee as in you don't sit with your team but you
| still have to commute to an office
| whiskey14 wrote:
| The point would be that the commute would be no more than
| 15 minutes to your office. Ideally walking distance
| eckza wrote:
| Not all of us want to live within 15 walking minutes of
| _anywhere_.
| shaoonb wrote:
| That's your choice. I would love to be within 15 minutes
| walk of my office, but I can't realistically afford it,
| so the choice of a longer commute is made for me.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Fine, but please stop making it illegal for those of us
| who do want walkability
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| Ok but whats the point when you're just on zoom anyway
| postalrat wrote:
| Teams should be reorganized so that they meet together.
| dagw wrote:
| So people get put on teams based on where they live
| rather than what they are good at or what the team needs?
| postalrat wrote:
| No. You do both.
| lamontcg wrote:
| You can now no longer reorg or have people move jobs
| without physically moving to someplace else around the
| world.
| postalrat wrote:
| Says you.
| yrgulation wrote:
| > Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new
| job after this announcement.
|
| Highest impact is mid project. You know, to make it hurt.
| bt4u wrote:
| corytheboyd wrote:
| > I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much
| when working remote, I'm just building it.
|
| I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking
| at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying
| to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our
| styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D
| trey-jones wrote:
| If I could WFS (Work From Shower), man I'd really get some
| good stuff done! WFT (Work From Toilet) also a good
| candidate.
| e40 wrote:
| How long is your commute?
| pcurve wrote:
| Rest of the world has largely gone back to office to work now,
| even if it is part time.
|
| I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.
|
| For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high
| performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment.
| You know, the HN people.
|
| My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist
| on WAH for the mass.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and
| the rest working from home.
|
| And all the evidence agrees.
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-unintended-consequences...
| kodah wrote:
| My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything
| provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to
| justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United
| States then people in the highest markets would get significant
| drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high
| housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than
| the average worker doing the same work over the same period of
| time.
|
| Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I
| say it".
| asdff wrote:
| It's not like your income is scaled to the housing costs
| though. I just checked craigslist for Los angeles and
| Columbus, Ohio. 1 bedroom average in LA is $2000 and change,
| Columbus its $1000. For a year in the average 1 bedroom, you
| are only paying $12k more or so for the unit in LA. Other
| costs are about the same, the same MSRP for consumer goods,
| about the same grocery bill (certain food is honestly very
| cheap in LA due to its year round availability), about the
| same $10 pints of beers and $12 entrees at your typical late
| 20s and up drinking/eating establishment.
|
| Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on
| the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k
| pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing
| costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
|
| I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast
| pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a
| higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do
| out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be
| on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job
| opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for
| companies to get at this network for its talent themselves,
| they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into
| the door. This is just what the prices of this market have
| come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through
| other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in
| cost of living.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher
| on the west coast than in the midwest,
|
| In northern CA this holds true and even moreso in Seattle.
| In southern california (notably because you mention Los
| Angeles), this is not true. There are high paying jobs in
| SoCal, but they are much scarcer than the talent pool.
| While there are more opportunities in SoCal than other
| parts of the west coast, they are lower paying and worse
| conditions overall that are closer to midwest counterparts.
| This view is borne of 40 years of experience in SoCal (and
| everyone I worked with). Moving to Seattle, I instantly
| made 30% more AND rent was cheaper.
| asdff wrote:
| FWIW average rents in seattle are about $1600 a month for
| 1 bedrooms on craigslist right now, so you'd only be
| saving $7200 a year living in Columbus Ohio. I know
| salary data online is what it is, but from zippia.com at
| least average SWE salary is $75k in Columbus, and $115k
| in seattle, so even with the cost of living difference of
| $7k factored in, there is a huge bump in pay for this job
| market of engineers versus the market in Columbus, OH.
| greedo wrote:
| I live in the midwest, in a house that's appraised around
| $350K. Every time I visit family on the West coast, I look
| at similar house prices, and they're all at least 3x or 4x.
| No way could I afford that; and I sure wouldn't get a huge
| salary bump for relocating.
| serverholic wrote:
| I secretly agree with you. I think the ideal situation is to
| accommodate both sets of needs. Personally I prefer 100% remote
| but if someone wants hybrid then that's fine too.
|
| I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate
| because I acknowledge that executives really would like
| everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself
| than do that.
| macjc wrote:
| I know most studies show remote work improves productivity. I
| have the opposite experience even though I need to take one
| hour to commute one way. Our office is 80% empty on average. I
| think this has greatly hurt the interaction between people,
| increased friction and slowed down project progress. I am sure
| some people are more efficient at home, but there might be a
| silent majority, who enjoy doing less work remotely and never
| voice themselves (or even say the opposite).
| BigJ1211 wrote:
| In most places it seems to be the opposite from what I gather
| from my clients. Small majority of people prefer to go into
| the office. Especially those with kids. And they are vocal
| about it.
|
| I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home.
| However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work
| because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.
| kibwen wrote:
| I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that
| it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where
| the balance lies.
|
| However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk
| isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration
| of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an
| authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be
| treated like cattle.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| He is spending his own money to pay the employees. He has
| every goddamn right to be "authoritarian" when spending his
| own money.
| kweingar wrote:
| Is it invalid to criticize any policy ever that a company
| imposes on its employees?
| alistairSH wrote:
| _pending his own money to pay the employee_
|
| If you're claiming his paying them out-of-pocket, can you
| provide a citation?
| grumple wrote:
| That is explicitly untrue. We have labor laws in this
| country and many others.
|
| Beyond that, all behavior is not reasonable just because
| it's done with ones own money.
| lrvick wrote:
| Everyone has the right to quit too. Anyone still at Twitter
| who is not sharpening their resumes and applying for new
| jobs at this point is a fool.
| v-erne wrote:
| Yeah, sure. Because society and culture does not change and
| evolve. It's standing still like its 1905 when predatory
| capitalism was all the rage and people was still angry for
| loosing all their literal slaves. At this scale those are
| not just his "own" money otherwise we are going to have
| another Nero and Caligula moments again in the future.
| [deleted]
| rurp wrote:
| Just because certain scummy behavior is legal doesn't make
| it ethical or a good business decision. Given what I have
| seen of his behavior I want absolutely nothing to do with
| Elon and his companies, either as a customer or employee,
| and am sure many others feel the same.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| That doesn't make him immune from criticism or being
| described as authoritarian. A negative view on an employer
| may not have an immediate impact but medium to long term it
| can make hiring and retaining difficult, which can drive up
| costs.
| otikik wrote:
| "He has every right to call them Negroes, after all he owns
| the plantation"
| jbm wrote:
| I'm trying to understand, is this comment a response to
| him ending remote work, or is this related to something
| else?
|
| If it is the former it is really uncalled for and
| downplays the struggle of African Americans in the United
| States.
|
| (Work at home, used to work in an awful office, still
| nowhere near slavery)
| mattkrause wrote:
| I assume this is a reference to the lawsuits accusing
| Tesla of racial discrimination, including calling an area
| staffed with Black workers "The Plantation"
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/tesla-...
| jbm wrote:
| Unbelievable. Thank you for the share.
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| First of all, that isn't the word that racist, slave-
| owning, plantation-owning population would use. If you
| are going to make a reference to our sad history in the
| United States of chattel slavery, use the accurate word.
| It doesn't do anyone a service to water down the absolute
| dehumanization the enslaved experienced at the hands of
| their "owners" (I quote that word to show disdain for the
| concept of humans owning humans, not to minimize the fact
| of ownership).
|
| Secondly, you have some gall to compare a CEO setting
| policies that are well within the confines of labor laws
| with human slavery. Beyond the absurdity of your
| comparison, don't forget that Twitter employees literally
| have the right to walk away. That is the antithesis of
| slavery.
|
| You are doing your own argument a massive disservice by
| making such absurd accusations. Instead of arguing on the
| merits of remote vs. in-person work, you invite an
| argument on your analogies. This is the same as calling
| anyone you disagree with politically a Nazi. Not only
| does it debase the absolute evil practiced by actual
| Nazis, it ends any chance of effective debate.
|
| Be better than that, please.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I didn't take the comment you are responding to in that
| way at all (comparing Musk's actions to that of a slave-
| owner). I believed the OP was reacting to the "it's
| Musk's money he can treat his employees as he likes" --
| by way of an analogy that you thought too extreme.
|
| (To be sure, if OP had used the "N-word" I am quite sure
| there would be much more condemnation though that would
| have unfortunately then entirely missed the point.)
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| > I believed the OP was reacting to the "it's Musk's
| money he can treat his employees as he likes" -- by way
| of an analogy that you thought too extreme.
|
| That is exactly the problem. The analogy was that Musk
| akin to a plantation owner, and his prerogative vis-a-vis
| twitter employees (by virtue of being CEO, a position he
| gained through a takeover with his "money") is akin to
| the rights plantation owners practiced vis-a-vis slaves
| on the plantation. This is exactly what the person I
| replied to implied.
|
| The problem I had was never with whether a CEO has a
| right to set policies like banning employees from remote
| work. The problem is that the analogy directly compared
| _employees_ to _slaves_. The former have the right to
| walk away, the latter never did (without risking death).
| No matter what the antecedent is (CEOs vs. plantation
| owners) the subsequent is a false likeness (slave vs.
| employee).
| bigfudge wrote:
| Er no. There are both social and legal norms around
| employment. I'm not saying he's breaking any laws here, but
| companies are a certain scale aren't just the playthings of
| the boss they exist at the convenience and for the benefit
| for society at large (ie they are granted the privilege of
| being a company). That means there are constraints on
| corporate behaviour.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| No, that's why we have labor laws. Being a billionaire
| doesn't make you a king.
|
| Every company is spending "their own money" to pay
| employees. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand
| shareholders or just one. There is still a corporate
| structure and formal employee relationships. They are
| employees, not serfs, and they deserve the respect that
| entails.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Being a billionaire doesn 't make you a king._
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employees-reveal-
| most-...
|
| _A former production employee who worked at the company
| over 10 years ago said he was surprised by his coworkers
| ' attitude toward Musk._
|
| _" When he walked by, people would bow down to him," the
| former employee said. "That was kind of surprising to
| me."_
| mwint wrote:
| I've never really wanted to do this before, but I want to
| figure out how to place a bet against this story being
| true in any meaningful sense.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Why is it so hard to believe that Musk may kind of be a
| jerk? Why do you have to deflect and find reasons to
| throw out evidence, especially when there are piles and
| piles of it?
| masklinn wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure a narcissistic egomaniac would never
| condone or encourage such behaviour, and there's no
| bootlicker out there who'd do it for brownie points.
| Completely unheard of.
| gnaritas99 wrote:
| bt4u wrote:
| knodi123 wrote:
| citing some evidence for all the people who are calling you
| out and accusing you of making up these claims against him:
|
| > He calls himself a "nano-manager".
|
| source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-pioneer-
| elon-musk-...
|
| > In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla
| employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure
| who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.
|
| source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-
| extreme-...
|
| > Elon Musk says remote workers are just pretending to work.
|
| source: https://fortune.com/2022/07/20/elon-musk-remote-work-
| from-ho...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is a flaggable comment in my opinion, unless you have
| genuine evidence of working closely with Musk. It seems
| obviously untrue based on how you wrote it.
| kweingar wrote:
| HN is full of strong comments like this. A lot worse has
| been said about many tech people on here (Larry Ellison
| comes to mind).
|
| Part of the cost of being a public figure and a
| multibillionaire is that people will talk about you without
| the same collegial tone that they'd use with their peers.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| He literally discussed this over text messages that were
| publicized as part of the trial discovery.
|
| Someone else has helpfully transcribed it here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552970
|
| The official document is here, see page 21 for the
| transcribed conversation, see plenty of other pages for his
| callous thought process:
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-
| musk-t...
|
| Also, I think a review of this site's guidelines is called
| for:
|
| > Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you
| did.
|
| > Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
| GeneralAntilles wrote:
| Mind citing that assertion?
| kibwen wrote:
| https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-praises-chinese-tesla-
| factory...
|
| _During a keynote speech on May 10, Elon Musk commended
| Tesla factory workers in China for working under conditions
| that break labor laws in many parts of the world --
| including those in China, as The Guardian pointed out. The
| high praise from Elon went out to workers who are being
| pushed to meet production goals in the middle of pandemic
| lockdowns, which have been ongoing at the Gigafactory in
| Shanghai since April. The Tesla CEO went on to compare
| Chinese workers with their American counterparts, who Musk
| says lack work ethic he considers impressive and vital for
| EV companies to succeed._
|
| _" There's just a lot of super talented and hardworking
| people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And
| they won't just be burning the midnight oil. They'll be
| burning the 3am oil. So they won't even leave the factory
| type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to
| avoid going to work at all."_
|
| _Going by what Musk says, it sure sounds like what they
| say is true: nobody wants to work anymore. That is, except
| for workers in China, where conditions enabling Tesla to
| meet production goals during lockdowns have less to do with
| burning oil past midnight, and more to do with China's
| extreme work culture. Meaning Musk isn't really praising
| hardworking people so much as a disregard for labor rules._
|
| _During the lockdowns, workers at the Gigafactory
| reportedly worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week and slept
| on the floor. Again, that's not only during recent
| lockdowns. This is actually common enough to be nicknamed
| "996." That's shorthand for work shifts going from 9am to
| 9pm, six days a week._
| greedo wrote:
| Jerry Pournelle once wrote that "unregulated capitalism
| will eventually end with human meat sold in market
| places, and slavery." Seems like Musk and his ultra-
| libertarian ilk are heading down that same path.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Wow, a great quote. It left out child labor as well but I
| guess you have to keep it concise.
| end_of_line wrote:
| That's right. We should all go back to the original,
| never tried out utopian communism.
| knodi123 wrote:
| or some sort of middle ground between these two manichean
| caricatures?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't see how you can so confidently connect labor
| issues in a Gigafactory to his beliefs surrounding the
| efficacy of remote work. You still have not addressed
| this part of your claim:
|
| > He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian
| micromanager
|
| You don't know why he's banning remote work, and you're
| guessing that its the most inflammatory reason you can
| come up with. You do not know.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552970
|
| from page 21 of
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-
| musk-t...
| sunsunsunsun wrote:
| The problem with hybrid is you're still bound geographically.
| My work insists on being hybrid (my job has no reason for me to
| be in the office) and it increases my cost of living by at
| least 50%, not to mention I'll never be able to be a home
| owner.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| IMHO the ideal situation would be for people to work in their
| own offices, with doors that closed, and short commutes. Easy
| to work distraction-free alone, easy to have group meetings and
| random chats.
|
| But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so
| something has to give.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I don't know how much commercial real estate costs, but in
| the region around Twitter's HQ it's about $5-$6k for a 1000
| square foot apartment
|
| Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial
| space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot
| office for each employee. Considering these employees are
| making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their
| productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile
| brewdad wrote:
| But since the cost of building those offices will be
| reflected in this quarter's earnings and destroy some
| executive bonuses, while the benefits won't be reflected in
| earnings for at least a full quarter and possibly longer,
| building individual workspaces is impossible.
| ctvo wrote:
| > But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so
| something has to give.
|
| I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable
| the last decade that thinking it's real estate costs that led
| them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work
| and collaboration.
| pseudonym wrote:
| I assume the larger portion of what's "untenable" is "short
| commutes"; spending multiple hours of unpaid personal time
| in a car per day just driving to and from work so that you
| can have the place you sleep be affordable is a huge
| downside of a lot of in-person jobs that used to be taken
| as more of a default pre-pandemic, before so many places
| showed "yeah we could let you work from home but we just
| don't want to".
|
| The downsides of an open floor plan can be at least
| partially countered by headphones, but there's much less
| that you can do on an individual level to make up for
| having that much of your personal time locked up in pure
| transit.
| [deleted]
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Remote work has changed a lot, but construction in the
| places where the big tech companies are headquarters is
| highly constrained. It's not like they all could
| immediately triple the size of their campuses again. Tech
| companies did build large new campuses at enormous cost,
| but mostly development crowded out other development.
| Everyone is bidding for the same land and labor.
|
| Reasonably, one company could give everyone an office but
| there's no way everyone could do it at once.
| FredPret wrote:
| Anything more than 0% office implies a huge sea change from 0%.
|
| To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease
| space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound
| geographically.
|
| At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only
| hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work
| from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now,
| versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-
| eight-hours method.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| Strangely enough I think this is the first objectively bad
| decision he has made since owning Twitter. The others are
| questionable for sure but this is a good way to lose your best
| engineers to companies that will respect them.
| izzydata wrote:
| I think blindly firing employees with low code counts is an
| objectively bad decision that ignores a lot of nuance and
| likely lost a lot of great engineers to companies that will
| respect them.
| e40 wrote:
| The idea that all lines of code are equal (in difficulty) is
| so absurd as to (in my memory) have been never discussed on
| HN before. Everyone here knows it. How could Elon not?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I've heard this before but never backed by any reputable
| source.
|
| Mind sharing where you got that from?
| the_doctah wrote:
| Is there any evidence that people were fired based on LoC?
| fragmede wrote:
| https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1588907407002185729
| #...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I actually have no strong opinions about whether remote work must
| be allowed or not... but presumably this is going to result in
| more people leaving, right? Presumably he knows this, right?
| (Maybe he's even counting on it?).
|
| I guess this is an interesting experiment in how much staff
| turnover you can have at a tech company like Twitter and still do
| fine.
|
| I personally would not expect it to go well. Losing everyone who
| knows how things work and starting over from scratch with all new
| employees in as short a time period as possible, or even doing
| your best to approach that asymptote... that can't be a good
| idea, can it?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| I'm just confused why anyone would still want to work there.
|
| I don't know what the local markets are like but my priority
| would be to jump ship at all costs.
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| Aka, "please resign en masse"
| elorant wrote:
| According to the email, Musk expects subscriptions to make up to
| 50% of revenue. Assuming that Twitter's revenue is around $5bn,
| and the subscription is at $8/month that's some 26M
| subscriptions, or 5,7% of its users. I don't think that a number
| so high is achievable, unless they pull a rabbit out of their
| hat.
| datalopers wrote:
| You're making the assumption that annualized revenue hasn't
| already dropped precipitously due to a loss in advertising
| dollars, and the bar for subscriptions to reach 50% is rapidly
| lowering.
| elorant wrote:
| Even if you cut the conversion at half it's still too high.
| Realistically speaking, anything above 1% is highly
| optimistic.
| greedo wrote:
| I'm sure he's expecting growth in both ARPU and total users.
| fckgw wrote:
| How is charging for a website that is currently free going to
| increase total users? It makes no sense.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Another way to achieve Musk's target would be to drop ad
| revenue numbers precipitously until it is equal to
| subscriptions - a process that may well be under way.
| elorant wrote:
| Sure, but in this case you'd hardly make any profit.
| Interests on that $13bn loan alone are somewhere around $1bn
| annually.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I'm fairly certain they were making a joke.
| vooner wrote:
| Born with an emerald spoon in his mouth, it's no surprise that
| Musk has no empathy with the common worker.
|
| On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly
| large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to
| laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.
| philistine wrote:
| Let's not mince words, and talk about his real world lived
| experience: he treats people like apartheid-era South Africa.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ah yes. Little is known about apartheid-era SA but the one
| thing we all know is that when you were fired, they paid you
| for 2 months and provided healthcare.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| take people out of their comfy lives for 2 days and they
| feel their petty problems are comparable to apartheid-era
| SA
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you think about it, when Nelson Mandela was in Victor
| Verster Prison, even they didn't make him pay for a blue
| check.
| Thorentis wrote:
| It's an employers market right now. With 11k laid off from Meta,
| and thousands more across tech, Twitter will have no issue
| finding staff if it needs them (assuming this decision causes
| even more to leave).
|
| I'm not convinced that Twitter actually needs more than 1k staff
| though. 100 infrastructure engineers, 600 platform engineers, and
| 300 support staff should be all it takes to run a lean ship doing
| what Twitter does.
| murphyslab wrote:
| > "over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding
| and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam."
|
| Is this goodbye to @ElonJet?
|
| Also, "troll" seems rather nebulous. Is it the end for anyone
| seen as a troublemaker?
| [deleted]
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| I don't think the intention is to suspend ElonJet since Musk
| has already explicitly said he made the choice to not suspend
| it despite the alleged "personal safety risk". Trolls in this
| case probably refers to accounts that paid for new Twitter Blue
| and are now impersonating well-known figures/entities.
|
| The wording seems consistent with everything going on at
| Twitter so far, that he's just kinda winging it while everyone
| else is frozen in confusion over the abrupt changes. A $44B
| acquisition is quickly reverting into the volatility of a 2006
| startup.
| freejazz wrote:
| >"Trolls in this case probably refers to accounts that paid
| for new Twitter Blue and are now impersonating well-known
| figures/entities."
|
| Do you mean parody accounts?
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Sort of, but only the kind that didn't obey Elon's hastily
| drafted "rule" that require clear labeling of parody
| accounts.
|
| Some (hilarious) examples of what I mean can be seen here:
| https://twitter.com/theserfstv/status/1590593334216916992
|
| These are amusing to look at, but for Twitter to be taken
| seriously long term this can't keep happening. Musk's $8
| Twitter Blue change is what unleashed this chaos in the
| first place.
| wordsarelies wrote:
| Surprise! That's when he last ran a software company.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| He's running two of the world's most successful software
| companies right now.
| neaden wrote:
| Are you counting Twitter as one of the most successful
| software companies?
| coffeeblack wrote:
| No, Tesla and SpaceX. Plus Neuralink, but Musk isn't
| involved in the operations there.
| Gud wrote:
| There's a lot of software involved in both Tesla and
| SpaceX. Much more advanced software then a web app.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Every company has software. That doesn't mean a car
| company operates like a social network
| coffeeblack wrote:
| No. And Musk already said so. What's the intention of the FUD?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > And Musk already said so.
|
| You think this matters? Did you not see the whole "comedy is
| legal again" followed by banning/suspending people for
| parodies? How quickly he went back on "free speech"?
| coffeeblack wrote:
| How is identity theft or impersonation "comedy"? Are all
| the crypto spammers "comedy" for you? Why not stay real and
| stop all the hate?
| jsbg wrote:
| > Is this goodbye to @ElonJet?
|
| No. [0]
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
| p0pcult wrote:
| They should all quit, demonstrate who actually holds the power.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| I would make them fire me, then file for unemployment.
| somecommit wrote:
| Do not forget that twitter purchased Vine and shoot it off, just
| in order to enable Tiktok taking over. That's not a very smart
| company for sure.
| randomguy0 wrote:
| The one-sidedness of the comments in this thread surprise me.
|
| If you want to work remotely, don't work at Twitter.
|
| There's absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it's more
| beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals
| and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people
| to work towards those goals.
|
| Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To
| give my opinion, if I ran a business that I was trying to grow or
| trying to meet lofty goals, I'd probably have people in the
| office too. However, I see upsides to working from home too.
|
| I've been working remotely since the beginning of COVID and
| currently work 2,000 miles away from my work.
| aaomidi wrote:
| It's fair to critique someone who just upended the lives of all
| these people.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Yeah, but most of the posts here aren't really critique,
| they're just sarcastic scorn. We get it, HN, you like remote
| work a lot and can't imagine any alternative.
| rtp4me wrote:
| Agreed. I have been reading HN for a while, and the
| overwhelming tone here is definitely "screw the
| manager/CIO/CEO" together with "If I have to go into the
| office, I will quiet quit, quit without notice, sabotage my
| employer", etc. It is truly shocking.
|
| I feel many on HN simply can't appreciate the great working
| conditions the IT industry has compared to other industries
| (health care, food service, social services, etc). Getting
| paid over $100K a year and crying about going to the
| office? Wow, just wow. Imagine how nurses feel getting much
| lower pay that are forced to go to work and deal with
| sick/unruly people...
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > HN simply can't appreciate the great working conditions
| the IT industry has compared to other industries
|
| These conditions don't happen by accident or by the
| goodwill of employers. They happen because people in the
| industry have such a hard attitude toward management.
| Stop pushing back and all these conditions will suddenly
| disappear.
|
| Your example of nurses is a good one. In some countries
| they have excellent conditions. In other countries, they
| have very poor conditions. Their impact on society is the
| same everywhere, but different historical events have
| allowed them to have their current work experience.
| rtp4me wrote:
| I don't know where you work/worked before, but I've only
| had 1 "bad boss" in my +30yr IT career. Even that boss
| did not rise to the level of "bad bosses" constantly
| criticized here on HN. Most/all of my bosses have been
| extremely understanding about work-life balance, family
| commitments, teamwork, collaboration, etc. Seems I been
| very lucky compared to the vast number of HN comments.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I'm reading the same comments, and there seems to be a
| reasonable amount of thoughtful writing too. In addition,
| there are sarcastic/scornful comments in the other
| direction too, yours included ("We get it, HN, you like
| remote work a lot and can't imagine any alternative."). Try
| not to get focused on individual snarky comments, because
| doing that makes those comments a bigger part of the
| conversation.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I'd wager most of us can imagine alternatives because we
| lived alternatives. We've figured out a method that works
| better for us and don't want to go back to losing hours a
| week for what we expect will have negative value (lower
| productivity, happiness, etc).
|
| Further, this edict is coming from someone that is
| presumable working remote now (for at least one company)
| and will continue to do so indefinitely. It's only natural
| to push back on that.
| bink wrote:
| It's fine for new management to have new business
| philosophies and want to implement them. But the way they are
| implemented matters as well.
| randomguy0 wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm comfortable judging the "fairness of
| critiquing", but it's a business under new ownership. Changes
| are going to happen.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And it's okay to bitch about "new management" doing harmful
| things
| ncallaway wrote:
| With three hours notice? A policy change that takes place
| _that very morning_ delivered at 2am?
|
| I'm happy to judge the critiques of that as "fair", and the
| changes themselves as "irresponsibly implemented".
|
| Ending remote work? Whatever. I disagree, but it's his
| business.
|
| Ending remote work with 3 hours notice? He's an asshole.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Taking the benefit away from employees currently exercising it
| (with zero grace period) is a little different than someone
| joining a company knowing they don't do remote work from the
| start.
|
| I'm not saying it makes Elon Musk a bad person (I think he's a
| bad person for plenty of other reasons), but I do think it's a
| poorly thought out move on his part that will cause some of the
| better employees that survived the layoffs to quit.
| arrrg wrote:
| It is my understanding that Twitter has been extremely friendly
| towards remote work.
|
| Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman
| cruelty without empathy. I'm not even taking any kind of legal
| perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to
| employee's lives can be enormous.
|
| I'm so happy to live in a country where this would be quite
| illegal to do.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| In an all-else-being-equal world, yes I can see the tradeoffs.
|
| The problem is that Elon has already destroyed the trust that
| should've existed between him and his newfound employees. It
| shouldn't be surprising that in such a relationship any
| managerial decisions are viewed with extreme skepticism towards
| their motivation.
|
| Not to mention all of the text messages we've already seen that
| already explain the motivation behind this move. Those were
| just one of the things that destroyed the trust.
| dmalvarado wrote:
| Must be in office. Must work at least 40 hours per week.
| Eliminated days of rest. As if twitter's problems are caused by
| "employees not working enough".
| ok_dad wrote:
| Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in
| the Navy we tried to bet which type it was:
|
| 1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship,
| interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was
| being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the
| operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in
| one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's
| crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).
|
| 2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship,
| made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally
| acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-
| concieved vision they had of how things should be.
|
| With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an
| org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who
| know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better
| command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.
|
| With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made
| everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus
| reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant
| failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought
| the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of
| those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we
| were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I
| left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer
| even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and
| basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of
| my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all
| according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I
| think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people
| who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one
| more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those
| that stay to build a better team.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| eli wrote:
| And how's that been going so far?
| nxm wrote:
| It's been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as others
| like Meta are) to ease the cost drain.
|
| Give Musk a chance... guy knows how to build and grow
| companies
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt on this but it
| seems like he's acting erratically and reactively, not
| inspiring confidence
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Grey check mark lasted less than a day? To me it seems
| like he's trying to do it all by himself in an area he
| has no expertise.
| astrange wrote:
| He's ignoring an FTC consent degree and seems to be
| running on annoyance that journalists got free bluechecks
| from their jobs.
| klyrs wrote:
| Twitter is not in a "build and grow" phase. This is his
| first hostile takeover of a large company with a
| saturated market, is it not?
| kennend3 wrote:
| > Give Musk a chance... guy knows how to build and grow
| companies
|
| Not sure, is there a government bailout or subsidy for
| tech companies as he got with Tesla?
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-
| subsidies-201...
| crtasm wrote:
| Fire people then ask some of them to come back?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Considering his reputation (alone, not the feats of those
| adjacent) how true is this?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > It's been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as
| others like Meta are) to ease the cost drain.
|
| I mean, the massive increase in cost is a result of
| Musk's debt purchasing Twitter.
| notinfuriated wrote:
| Would you mind explaining this a bit further? I'm out of
| the loop here and don't know anything about Twitter's
| costs before or after Musk's purchase.
| klyrs wrote:
| He had to take out a giant loan to afford the purchase
| (debt financing), which twitter needs to pay about $1B a
| year to service. Twitter wasn't getting anywhere near
| that in profit.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor,
| this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and
| deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The
| ship needs to do something new, and this is something new,
| but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.
| pajtl wrote:
| Wouldn't the new commander always say the ship is not running
| smoothly?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| Wouldn't they know going in what high-command's view of the
| ship was? Couldn't they judge the ship and crew against the
| others in the fleet?
| happymellon wrote:
| The only thing that ever happens on these scenarios, are that
| the skilled folks who are concerned about losing their jobs
| will move and Twitter will be left with the dregs who stay
| because they can't get a new job elsewhere.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Thank goodness COs can operate entire ships by themselves,
| otherwise they'd probably need some tact and grace to get the
| ship to its destination safely.
| masklinn wrote:
| > The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at
| all according to the new commander.
|
| That's not a difference at all, as it would be exactly what
| (2) were thinking of their new commands as well.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Has that approach ever succeeded anywhere?
| kadoban wrote:
| > The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at
| all according to the new commander
|
| I mean, if you ask any commanders in group 2, they're going
| to all say that.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Your entire reasoning behind your comment indicates you don't
| understand this point I'm making about leadership. You're
| talking about a "new plan" as if we all agreed that Twitter
| was doing _so badly_ that it needed a 180. You use
| "dissidents" and "better team" as if it's a fact that things
| are so bad _and_ the team is so inept that Elon could do
| nothing but burn the place to the ground and make a phoenix
| from the ashes.
|
| My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's
| current head, it's a massive organism and if you make
| systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism
| massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than
| improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large
| and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium
| steps that are well-thought-out, over time.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| You seem to be basing this on the idea of a ship full of
| decent and willing sailors who had a common cause. I'm sure
| even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get
| rid of malingerers or enemy sympathizers.
|
| Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him
| down personally and entire useless product divisions so the
| best thing to do is cut out the expensive rot - nothing
| ruins morale like having hostile and counterproductive
| teammates dragging you down.
|
| The part of the company takes takes tweets, stores tweets,
| and displays tweets seems to be working fairly well. The
| rest is on the rocks or was headed for them full steam.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| >Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him
| down personally
|
| Not trying to be confrontational, but whenever I see
| comments like this, I think that people really need to
| read up on narcissistic personality disorder. The "I'm
| being personally attacked" tactic is glaringly apparent.
| It's super common in cults too when the cult leader
| starts losing control of things (since they commonly have
| narcissism as well). People with NPD are completely
| incapable of comprehending that they may actually be at
| fault in any way and absolutely have to interpret failure
| as being due to conspiracies against them
| ok_dad wrote:
| > I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention
| would still get rid of malingerers
|
| No, they'd try and figure out the motivation of the
| malignerer, or lack thereof, first. We had one guy who
| was a great tech, but then for a few months he showed up
| drunk to watch and was lazy. Found out his wife left him
| with the kids, to another state. The officer's mess
| arranged with some of the enlisted senior crew to invite
| the guy to family events every week, dinner and stuff,
| and helped him get back that family feeling with the
| ship, so he had something to work for.
|
| > or enemy sympathizers.
|
| I doubt anyone in the Navy I met was a spy for an enemy.
| I also doubt someone at Twitter is rooting for TikTok and
| working against Twitter in that direction.
| escaper wrote:
| God how can I downvote this. Did you even read what the OP
| said? So in this case the "dissidents" are people that
| appreciate incremental change, like their opinions to be
| valued in their respective field of expertise, and possibly
| appreciate being able to work from home?
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| >>>>> and generally acted like they owned the place
|
| this is the $44B problem to your CO analogy.
|
| Skin in the game. The world runs far better on it.
| baxtr wrote:
| Nah. He doesn't own twitter like you own a house. People can
| just quit and leave.
|
| In fact a CO might be in better position in that regard.
| Soldiers don't quit as fast as devs.
| deltree7 wrote:
| There will be plenty of devs desperate for work as large
| companies cuts a significant portion of the work.
|
| Bottomline, the last time tech truly saw a recession and
| slow-down was in 2001. So, the entire dev cohort has never
| seen economic conditions that they are about to face.
|
| Even high performers at Meta, Coinbase, Netflix will have
| to navigate this.
|
| There are two choices in front of them
|
| a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires 60+
| hours of work. High workload / High Reward
|
| or
|
| b) Join services firm like IBM, TCS and have work-life
| balance but do menial tasks with steady but medium pay.
|
| Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them.
|
| Most devs are completely out of touch about the economic
| reality. Now they have to work hard like the rest of other
| industries.
| lovich wrote:
| The labor market is still incredibly tight for engineers.
| Even these current layoffs have targeted non tech
| departments for the majority of their cuts, if they
| included engineering at all. Companies still want to
| build and there's not enough hands.
|
| From everyone I'm in contact with it's a terrible time to
| be in sales, marketing, or hr, and the engineers are
| mostly bitching about no raises this year
| deltree7 wrote:
| This is an out of touch comment, not understanding the
| supply / demand context.
|
| It's not only about layoffs, but not enough absorbing
| capacity for freshly printed Tech graduates the
| universities are churning out at the rate expecting
| previous level of hiring.
|
| Most HN guys demanding work-life balance have seen
| nothing yet.
|
| This is a great time for Startups and Startup-like firms
| like Twitter to hire and require 60+ hours workload.
| There will be fresh graduates from Stanford, MIT,
| Berkeley who have no choice but to put pressure on
| existing coasters on various companies
| tablespoon wrote:
| > a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires
| 60+ hours of work. High workload / High Reward
|
| Twitter is not a startup, and my understanding is
| startups are only "high reward" if your bet pays off
| (e.g. you got in early enough AND the startup was
| successful enough).
|
| > Most devs are completely out of touch about the
| economic reality. Now they have to work hard like the
| rest of other industries.
|
| Your a/b binary choice is out of touch in its own way.
| deltree7 wrote:
| This is exactly what I mean by 99% HN dev cohort
| completely out of touch with reality.
|
| Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to a)
| find product market fit with a new vision b) Have
| negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce
| burn rate. c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with
| high upside rewards. d) Will have a liquidity event in a
| couple of years (IPO)
|
| For all practical purpose, Twitter is a startup.
|
| Musk will issue new equity
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to a)
| find product market fit with a new vision b) Have
| negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce
| burn rate. c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with
| high upside rewards. d) Will have a liquidity event in a
| couple of years (IPO)
|
| That sounds like a very idiosyncratic definition of a
| "startup" that would match all kinds of poorly performing
| companies no one would label a "startup." I think being
| new, small, and chasing orders-of-magnitude upside from
| that small start are pretty key to the conventional
| definition, neither of which apply to Twitter anymore.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| There's a third option of joining a small, lean,
| bootstrapped company with good work-life balance, which
| tend to thrive when the market isn't as frothy.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them.
|
| He just held an all hands where he said he doesn't know
| how long a run rate Twitter has, Twitter may lose
| billions next year, and bankruptcy isn't out of the
| question, so it sounds like it's possible he may have
| trouble hiring anyone.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Yes, just like Tesla, SpaceX, probably NeuraLink.
|
| That's how he motivates people
| mikkergp wrote:
| By sending all of his companies into bankruptcy? He
| motivated 5 top execs to leave!
| deltree7 wrote:
| Good Riddance
| agrajag wrote:
| You can't realistically argue that twitter will have as
| easy a time hiring as SpaceX and Tesla. They might have
| the same shitty working conditions, but without the risk
| of the company going under in a year or two. Plus
| everyone already there knew what they were signing up for
| when they joined, but at twitter you should expect a
| 50-75%+ employee churn over the next year. You don't join
| twitter today unless you treat it like a short term
| contracting job.
| deltree7 wrote:
| There is always a fresh supply of extremely bright
| engineers from Stanford/MIT/Berkeley and thousands of
| universities who will have trouble finding jobs in a
| hiring freeze environment and wouldn't mind working for a
| startup like Twitter (driven by mission and large upside
| with equity if successful).
|
| Not everyone in this world is a coaster
| mikkergp wrote:
| See, I've been wondering this, so you think that he's
| driving all the advertisers and employees away to start
| fresh, with advertisers and employees who are loyal? Do
| you think the subscription service will be enough to make
| up the lost revenue or, how do you think he'll earn the
| billion in interest payments he needs, sell Tesla stock?
| AJ007 wrote:
| Down votes make me think a lot of HNers are in for a
| brutal shock.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Remove Twitter from a) and add a third option: c) work at
| any company that isn't clearly being run into the ground.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Can you give me an example of this unicorn company which
| isn't facing cash-crunch and burn rate?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I can give you many examples of unicorns that weren't
| firing people one week after a takeover by a billionaire
| who doesn't understand how account verification works.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Musk was firing useless departments (DEI, Human Rights,
| Ethics, Communications) -- Mostly rent-seeking roles that
| has no place in startups.
|
| Musk also fired Engineers who weren't productive in the
| past two months. Musk has enough software expertise to
| see through people who bullshit and people who know their
| shit.
|
| That's why the best Car Designer, the best rocket
| engineer, the best AI expert were all working for
| Tesla/SpaceX.
|
| Is Musk clueless about Social Media? absolutely.
|
| Do you think he isn't spending every waking second to
| figure out the nuances and deliver something amazing in
| 2-3 years?
|
| This is where HN/Reddit/Blind/Media are clueless about
| Musk. They look at current state of Musk and mock him
| (they mocked him for his rocket dream, his electric car
| dream, they mocked his tents)
|
| True to form and cluelessness, they are currently mocking
| his lack of expertise in creator economy and other social
| aspects of social media.
|
| Let's try 2 years from now. Musk is a fast learner and
| has always pivoted when data shows him where he is wrong.
|
| He will make plenty of mistakes and clueless media will
| be there to highlight that because there is an audience
| of clueless people who are thirsty for Elon Musk
| thrashing articles to feel good about themselves.
|
| At the end of the day, Twitter will be successful, Elon
| will be a Trillionaire (from all his ventures) and there
| will be salty HN/Redditers who will still be mocking him
| in 2030 because he probably would be doing some stupid
| thing in some new industry
| [deleted]
| tthun wrote:
| how much skin in the game .. isn't this a leveraged buyout,
| with twitter on the hook for the borrowed money ..
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| He put up about 30B, financed 14B.
|
| Still a lot of skin.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| Whether or not they literally own the place is aside from the
| posters point about new leaders coming in and automatically
| upending everything without taking the time to actually
| listen to people and learn what actually is and isn't
| working. But yeah, it's an ironic choice of words.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Skin in the game? A ship commander might die if something on
| the ship goes wrong.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
|
| I see you edited your comment from the original:
|
| > this seems to be a significant problem to your CO analogy.
|
| So let me ask you... how does a ship's commanding officer
| _not_ have more skin in the game? A rich person loses their
| second home or yacht when things go south... a person on a
| ship can hit the brig or lose their life.
| agrajag wrote:
| You'd be surprised at how much you can fuck up a ship as a
| CO without life-changing consequences. Unless there's gross
| negligence a CO is almost certainly not even going to get
| discharged even if their actions lead to death of a sailor.
|
| They'll stop being CO and will never be promoted, but will
| finish out their Navy career in a job where they can't hurt
| anyone, and will have almost no impact once they retire and
| go into civilian life.
|
| They're not going to do time in the brig unless there's
| willful misconduct.
| baxtr wrote:
| Steve Job's return to Apple was 1)
|
| Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is 2)
| [deleted]
| iwillbenice wrote:
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| You are assuming that he is optimizing for employee happiness.
| I am not associating a value judgement to whether that is the
| right/wrong move in Twitter's context.
|
| I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon
| Musk might do to Twitter next.
|
| It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I
| hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much
| the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to
| think that they won't barring some exceptions.
| samus wrote:
| I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at
| seeing these social media empires being toppled.
|
| The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that
| completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or
| two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are
| willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work
| if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Actual happiness was not the point. In the Navy, the CO
| doesn't have to care about employee happiness, anyways, while
| Musk sort of does. 'Happiness' was a rhetorical device I used
| there.
| thordenmark wrote:
| A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and
| drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Whether or
| not you agree with those measures, well you don't have $44b on
| the line. Of all of Elon's businesses, this one is probably the
| most in his wheelhouse. He's a web guy after all.
| gdubs wrote:
| I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist
| before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways,
| but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.
| user_ wrote:
| I think it's 1.2B/annum, not 12B.
| [deleted]
| wefarrell wrote:
| He's a web guy in the same way that Rudy Giuliani is an
| expert in criminal law. It was true in the 90s but definitely
| not anymore.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| He is not a web guy, but he is a Twitter power user, thus
| sees problems and limitations in the platform. But then:
| his usage and experience probably is far from
| representative for most users.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient
| and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it._
|
| Was it that before Musk actually decided to buy it? Because
| as far as I can tell, the ad dollars started dropping after
| his announcement.
| throwuwu wrote:
| Their net profit was all over the place for the last 5
| years including a big net loss during the pandemic.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| > He's a web guy after all
|
| Of course he is.
| citrined wrote:
| patient is dying, better chop off an arm and a leg and remove
| some of the monitors and move the patient to a different
| building.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Extreme, but sometimes patients need exactly that
| luckylion wrote:
| Wait, each ship works completely different from the other
| ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew
| just figures out how they want to do encryption?
|
| When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long
| onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do
| they coordinate?
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Of course there are standards, execution is another story
| ok_dad wrote:
| > Wait, each ship works completely different from the other
| ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew
| just figures out how they want to do encryption?
|
| There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other
| ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-
| comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most
| of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes
| you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards
| from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be
| run with some discretion.
|
| Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy
| crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in
| the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO
| asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was
| alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you
| do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you
| did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check
| out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said
| "ok".
|
| > When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long
| onboarding as well,
|
| Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For
| some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good
| while.
|
| > does each ship have its own culture?
|
| Yes, undoubtedly.
|
| > How do they coordinate?
|
| Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc.
|
| But seriously, we have some standards for operations that
| make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You
| also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more
| to coalesce those ships into a unit.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| Military aircraft carriers are going to operate in a manner
| completely different from boats carrying skipping containers,
| if we're going with this analogy. The number of social media
| companies Musk had any experience running prior to buying
| Twitter is 0.
| edwnj wrote:
| Difference is you served (or are serving) during peacetime.
| This is wartime..
|
| Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap
| which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at
| 2x-3x what its actually worth.
|
| Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access
| to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering
| a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter)
| which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt
| ok_dad wrote:
| The Navy doesn't differentiate between wartime and peacetime
| for training or operations, generally. The difference would
| lie in what type of ordnance we used (real during wartime,
| inert during peace) and the measures we operated under at sea
| (we'd emit less signals and dog the hatches).
|
| Also, in wartime, it's actually _even more_ important that a
| new CO didn 't upset the delicate balance or change
| procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and
| drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes
| it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be
| deadly.
|
| Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make
| assumptions.
| edwnj wrote:
| I meant no disrespect, just an educated guess since there
| has been no _major_ war after WWII..
|
| I'm mainly talking about the difference in strategy/posture
| during wartime vs peacetime.. Just look at whats happening
| in Ukraine rn, Russia changing commanders to go full
| scorched earth.
|
| To save a company like Twitter, this is exactly the kind of
| thing u need to do. Private equity does this all the time.
| [deleted]
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Ah yes, it's like Sun Tzu said, the best way to wage a war is
| to get rid of half your army, and demoralize the other half.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| If half of the army hates you and is trying to make you
| lose, yeah.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| I don't think he got rid of people based on how they felt
| about him, but even if he did, surrounding yourself with
| yes men is not a good strategy
| alxlaz wrote:
| Seeing someone who served in the Navy being told that their
| peacetime service is very different from the war that Twitter
| is currently experiencing is... I'm not even sure how to
| react to that. Lots of execs like to stretch those military
| metaphors -- they're all in the trenches, all hands on deck,
| take no prisoners and all that -- but I think you may have
| stretched this one way past its breaking point.
| edwnj wrote:
| You're twisting my words. Peacetime is different to wartime
| is a general statement that has nothing to do with his
| service.
|
| Military metaphors are common in business for a reason.
| Modern business management inherited a lot of the military
| after WW2. To this day, you'll see people with Special Ops
| history consulting businesses (Echelon Front)
| bhaak wrote:
| > Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap
| which are crashing like a shitcoin..
|
| Whatever state Twitter was in before Musk entered with a
| white knight syndrome, it was in a better state than it is
| now.
|
| > Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.
|
| Well, that was his first mistake at Twitter before he even
| "owned" it.
| chson wrote:
| _and generally acted like they owned the place_
|
| To be fair, he actually does own the place.
| usefulcat wrote:
| ownership != operational knowledge
| samus wrote:
| It doesn't seem like he really cares about the place though
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I award no points for fairness because that is completely
| beside the point.
| ok_dad wrote:
| True, and to be fair, CO's have "own the place" power most
| times (while underway at least).
| cerved wrote:
| To be fair, he owns _most_ of the place
| msmith wrote:
| I wonder if you've read Turn the Ship Around [1]? It's one of
| my favorite leadership books and tells the true story of the
| Navy captain who was put in the awkward position of running a
| submarine class that he was not familiar with.
|
| He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the
| crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-
| and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you
| describe in type 1.
|
| [1] https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/
| ok_dad wrote:
| Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that
| turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today.
| Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and
| personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's
| Navy.
|
| If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent
| to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you
| notice he's writing books for a living now.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that
| turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists
| today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions
| and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in
| today's Navy.
|
| This is a disease of all peacetime militaries. The Army
| suffers the same problem. They spend an entire career
| LARPing in camouflage, and think that somehow means they
| know anything at all about warfare or leadership.
| agrajag wrote:
| A major problem is that life in the Navy sucks too much
| compared to the civilian world, so that most of the
| competent Naval Officers leave, and you end up with a
| pretty small pool of competent leaders. It's a super weird
| dynamic where junior officers are on average more competent
| than mid-career officers.
|
| As for why life sucks so much, leadership has let there be
| too much to do with too few people, and inflexible systems.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| FWIW they teach 1 in MBA schools, if MBAs are doing 2 it's
| despite their education, not because of it.
|
| Also most top tier MBA programs are an excuse to get wildly
| drunk basically daily and make a bunch of powerful friends,
| so it's very possible most people who go don't learn a damn
| thing.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Same with leadership and officers, we definitely got good
| training teaching #1, but the actual culture of the fleet
| is #2.
|
| Sorry to rag on MBAs.
| gdubs wrote:
| When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over
| again was to live with it through a few seasons before making
| any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see
| what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up
| to, where the best views are.
|
| It's something I think about to this day. As we've made
| progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly
| informed by those observations -- and it's really easy to see
| how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or
| lacking context.
| the-printer wrote:
| Thanks for this..do you farm-blog by any chance?
| cpeterso wrote:
| Good advice about the seasons. Sounds like "Chesterton's
| Fence": The more modern type of reformer goes
| gaily up to [the fence] and says, "I don't see the use of
| this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent
| type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see
| the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go
| away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that
| you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
| skc wrote:
| >Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue
|
| I've seen a lot of people calculating how many subscriptions
| would be required to hit this number as of today, but they're all
| forgetting to factor in Apple's and/or Google's cut.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| So, this is just to get rid of more people without having to lay
| them off. Coaching out people is not very 2022. Will cost Twitter
| more than it is worth for sure.
| cr4nberry wrote:
| why would anyone want to work for this asshole? It's not like the
| employees are well paid compared to other companies. If I wanted
| to get fisted, I'd just go to amazon and get a bigger check for
| it
| boatsie wrote:
| Except Amazon is in a hiring freeze. Musk knows now is the time
| to make "unreasonable" demands.
| kleiba wrote:
| _Prior to Musk's arrival, Twitter had established a permanent
| work-from-anywhere arrangement for its workers_
|
| ...for some definition of the word "permanent".
| aeyes wrote:
| Did you sign a new contract making your work location "remote"?
| If not then it was never going to be permanent.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the US at least, even if you're categorized as remote, the
| company can almost certainly pull you back to an office and
| fire you if you won't. It probably wouldn't be considered as
| "for cause" (IANAL) but a company can pretty much
| unilaterally change work conditions, responsibilities, etc.
| so long as no labor laws are violated.
| [deleted]
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Updated to "work-from-anywhere in the building" now. With half
| of the staff gone you can claim any empty desk or office in
| sight, I hear the CISO and chief compliance officer's spots are
| open!
| bogota wrote:
| Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in
| another place or made life decisions based on this policy which
| is likely a lot of people. This is really showing that you
| don't respect or care about your employees which is par for the
| course for musk. However i think what he is forgetting is that
| Twitter isn't some amazing challenge to solve like self driving
| or rockets. I think you will see a very understaffed twitter in
| the future.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Man, that's an interesting point
|
| I could imagine putting up with a lot of shit from Elon if I
| believed I was building a better future for humanity in the
| process, but it's hard to see how a social network is
| accomplishing that
| padjo wrote:
| Yep you get away with a lot of shitty leadership and tough
| conditions if you can get everyone to buy in to the
| mission. Hard to see how you could convince anyone that
| twitter is worth fighting for now.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Debatable. "The town square for the world" is a lofty enough
| goal.
| [deleted]
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Remote work is about the only thing where I very much disagree
| with Musk. I get it for engineering physical things. But not for
| web software. In that area, remote works much better than in-
| office, at least for me.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ironically, the Tesla robots would (with a VR headset) enable
| physical-thing workers to work remotely.
| erulabs wrote:
| I agree, but I think either full on-site or fully remote are
| both _leagues_ better than partially remote. Partially remote
| is far worse than either - because now all the in-person
| tactics exclude the remote folks, and all the remote work
| tactics are an unnecessary burden to the in-office folks. An
| all-remote team of heads-down engineers is 99% as good as in-
| person, if not better, because now all the communication has
| been written down and recorded.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Nevermind that in a partial remote scenario, like anywhere
| from 20-80% of the staff are wfh on any given day.
| elif wrote:
| i guess this is one way to deflate the tech bubble
| evbogue wrote:
| https://archive.ph/CN49N
| pdx6 wrote:
| This whole thing is SGI syndrome. The tight knit teams that were
| either let go or quit Twitter will go and found the next
| equivalent Nvidia or Adobe. Elon is making the classic Valley
| blunder of trying to make a company something it's not, in this
| case x.com. See also AOL, Yahoo!, and Tumber.
|
| If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat
| my shoe however.
| yummybear wrote:
| At this point why would anyone want to stay at twitter? The mood
| must be absolutely abysmal.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| ajkjk wrote:
| Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that.
| On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed
| with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone
| come in and clean house / shake things up would be very
| exciting.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Even the biggest Musk fanboy at Twitter isn't immune to the
| morale hit from a doubling or trebling of their workload
| because their team was cut in half from layoffs. What
| consolation is the company "getting back on course" if you've
| got to work 70+ hour weeks for the next several months. No
| time off, sleeping at your desk, never seeing family, and
| certainly no holiday time off. At the end you now work for a
| Musk company so your compensation will lag the SV mean.
|
| I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels _happy_.
| That 's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.
| freejazz wrote:
| Yes, I cannot wait for the chance to take my own company's
| legal liability onto my own shoulders so I can prove how
| faithful I am to my new leader!!
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Unless Musk is giving existing workers a ton of ISOs I don't
| see why they should care at all how Twitter does at this
| point. A worker being excited about a shakeup entailing
| significantly less freedom, and significantly more work,
| stress and instability has got to have a bad case of brain
| worms.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Stock options in a non public company are only as valuable
| as the boss decides to make them.
|
| They do work as toilet paper though.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Layoffs are always morale-killers. Twitter isn't particularly
| special in this regard, and if Twitter found a way to lay off
| 50% within 3 days to a _boost of morale to the remaining
| workforce_ that would be finally be the one truly innovative
| accomplishment its done, lol.
| e40 wrote:
| The podcast _Hard Fork_ interviewed (with disguised voices) 2
| current twitter employees (both had been there a long time).
| The GP is right, it 's a terrible environment.
| [deleted]
| ajkjk wrote:
| Oh yeah, not surprised. I'm just griping that there's a lot
| of assuming going on in here and it's worth, like,
| checking.
| d35007 wrote:
| How many are left? /s
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Blind has a sentiment analysis called 'Pulse' where verified
| employees answer survey Q's about their company. Employee
| morale has driven off a cliff.
| acomjean wrote:
| I survived two rounds of layoffs before I jumped ship. The
| work environment was just wasn't pleasant after the first
| round.
|
| Actually I can't imagine a scenario where I'd be happy people
| got let go. (Even I felt kinda bad when "annoying talk
| politics everyday real loud for at least 30 minutes while
| everyone is working hard guy" got let go)..
| shapefrog wrote:
| Over summer, tech companies were offering wheelbarrows full of
| cash to potential employees. Love him or hate him, once he
| started f'ing around at twitter, why would anyone have stayed?
|
| Unless you really desperately wanted to be in the presence of
| the man himself, and maybe thought he was going to buy you a
| horse in exchange for something
| bawolff wrote:
| Probably it takes more than a week to find a new job and
| people like to have the new job in hand before quiting the
| old one.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| It's been 2 weeks since he officially bought it, but
| working at twitter (and even as an outsider just reading
| the news), you see the writing on the wall. There were tons
| of reports of planned layoffs, and the changes that Elon
| wanted to see in the company. None of what he is doing is
| surprising, least of all to Twitter employees.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Companies have always known that employees will put up
| with abysmal conditions to some level. The stress,
| effort, insecurity, and fear of finding a new job has
| always had an extreme value to most people.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Layoffs started over the summer. Hiring freezes had been
| implemented.
|
| I'm sure many twitter employees thought he would drag his
| feet or the deal would fall through, and they'd have at least
| a year+ of time before he comes in.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Probably because the people getting let go aren't in high
| demand anywhere with current tech layoffs
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I love how he from loved one of today's liberals turned out to be
| their nemesis.
| esalman wrote:
| Twitter is going down. The question is whether it will take Musk
| down with it.
| elorant wrote:
| Tesla's stock is down 30% the last couple of months. So my
| guess is it probably will.
| dusing wrote:
| While the rest of tech a d the stock market are way up this
| year!
| sdze wrote:
| I can only hope Elon goes bankrupt. He and his man-child-fans
| are the most obnoxious people on this planet.
| fundad wrote:
| He's been embarrassing himself for a minute already but the
| answer isn't definitely no.
|
| What I realized is he saw contraction in demand at Tesla and
| wanted a public pretense to sell some without triggering a
| panic. He had all the Tesla projections long before his tweet
| about feeling "super bad" about the economy. This deal turned
| funny money into feeling like a club promoter.
| viraptor wrote:
| The real question is, will it last longer than the lettuce
| though... https://lettuce.wtf/
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| Regardless of the merits of remote/office or what this
| announcement would mean at a normal company, it sounds like it
| must be pure chaos at Twitter right now.
| bmitc wrote:
| I'd imagine it's been chaos ever since Musk started this whole
| deal months ago.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Half the chaos, smart.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-10 23:00 UTC)