All Twitter Offices Closed as Hundreds of Employees Resign
rollingstone.comTo recap this (briefly), in the month or so since Twitter was forced to acquire Twitter after impulsively agreeing to acquire it, Elon has:
1. Fired all the contractors (~40% of staff)
2. Laid off fairly arbitrarily laid off half of the FTEs;
3. Tried to hire back some of those laid off as it became apparent many of these people were necessary;
4. Tried to help cover the $1 billion/year interest payments for purchasing Twitter (a business already losing moneY) introduced Twitter Blue, a much-ridiculed and poorly-communicated feature for essentially selling verified statu at $8/month;
5. Fired employees who (publicly and privately) criticized these moves;
6. At 2:30am sent out an email that work from home was cancelled as of that day. In 2020, Twitter had previously said WFH was indefinite and had hired employees on a permanent WFH basis. This was later clarified to only apply to those who could reasonably come into the office (without defining what's "reasonable") and failure to do so would be taken as resignation;
7. This was partially rescinded on a case-by-case basis. Apparently managers would be held responsible. If a manager said someone was indidpensable and they weren't or was performing well and they weren't, the manager oculd be fired;
8. Told remaining employees that they would be expected to work longer and harder for the same (or less) pay and they were welcome to leave if they didn't agree to it;
9. Managers would be expected to have 20+ reports and spend 20% or more of their time coding;
10. This week employees were asked to agree to these conditions or accept 3 months pay as severance. Anecodtally somewhere between 50 and 80% of employees have chosen to accept the severance.
11. This has caused panic and frantic attempts to retain key senior technical staff. It is believed many of whom have refused;
12. Fearing some form of retaliation, the offices were today closed. Badges have been disabled and offices locked. Apparently this was so indiscriminate that a bunch of employees got trapped in the parking garage in Sunnyvale because their badges were disabled and the team responsible for activating them had been fired or had quit.
Elon truly is speedrunning this and has been the best evidence thus far that the meritocracy is a lie (which it is).
Yea, so anyone here want to tell me again why tech doesn't need a union? Seems like this all could have been fought back to some degree if coworkers had each other's backs (ie, their own voice).
Because Twitter employees are well compensated and can apparently just quit and be fine
This, but unironically... Has there ever been a union for those making 200k+?
Cops, firefighters, dock workers, harbor pilots, actors, nurses, etc
OK, I'll bite: cops make 200k+ in the states?
In major cities yes, SFPD for example starts just over $100k base and you can rack up a lot of overtime.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-fra...
Professional athletes, Hollywood actors, Boston police…
> 3. Tried to hire back some of those laid off as it became apparent many of these people were necessary;
I don't think there's anything particularly notable here, since this happens whenever there's mass layoffs. I've only seen this quantified as "some". With Twitter being such a profitable topic for all the news agencies, I fully expect quantity over quality, for all related reporting.
It almost seems on purpose but that seems like a money and reputation to burn to what, defeat wokeism? Pave the way for truth social? Seems very high risk to assume that Twitter is that essential a source of that influence.
To try to steel man a mass cut to headcount, and increased focus, note the feature complexity, and time between them, in this history up to 2017: https://blog.interactiveschools.com/blog/the-evolution-of-tw...
What feature set, between 2017 and now, justifies a doubling of headcount, since then?
I mean you’re not wrong and it’s not over yet.
“ How do you make a small fortune in social media?
Start out with a large one.”
I just kept wondering, why in the heck would you want to work there anymore? Is it this amazing devotion to Musk for...what?
This just makes me think Musk basically got rich off of other people's ideas and hard work. This guy seems incredibly stupid.
He’s not stupid, he just isn’t as smart as he and all his sycophants think, and certainly not smart enough to overcome his myriad of personality and mental health disorders. Unfortunately for us, after ruining a perfectly fine company and damaging the lives of thousands of employees, he’ll loudly retreat to his lair to sit on his remaining mountain of gold, recharge his narcissistic tank, and then emerge to set something else ablaze. After all, this is what dragons do. And that’s how all of us should think of his ilk, as dragons. They don’t care a lick about who or what or they ruin in pursuit of an ever larger pile of gold.
Twitter was never perfectly fine. It has lost billions of dollars.
Unless they’ve lost more than 44 billion dollars, it appears they turned a profit in the end. I’m sure twitter’s recently enriched stock holders are pleased with the company’s collective performance.
Operating profit is not the same as being bought for X dollars.
It'll be nice when hacker news stops being twitter news 24/7.
I mean the dumpster fire will burn out eventually but someone threw a Tesla battery in this one so it’s the most spectacular one in a while.
Wild times fellas