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Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#31

Post by toolz »

recuter wrote: post #22
unnouinceput wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

While I agree it's silly to think musk is going to fire everyone, Whatsapp hit 1 billion messages a day with only 11 engineers. I certainly think twitter could function at a base feature set with far fewer than 2k.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#33

Post by adlpz »

recuter wrote: post #22
unnouinceput wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

Actual question for anyone familiar with the company inner workings: What are those ~8000 people doing at Twitter?!? I guess they do sales and advertising stuff. Would that be a large chunk? The tech doesn't seem that crazy and they don't really ship much so I wouldn't thing they need that many technical people. Is it mostly an army of moderators?

I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just seeing what Twitter does, the ~8000 number seems crazy, doesn't it?

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#34

Post by saagarjha »

jbverschoor wrote: post #30
saagarjha wrote: post #7

They will be paid out on the same schedule, but as cash (at $54.20). I assume this will also be true of promised grants with a number attached to them that have not yet been converted to a fixed number of shares yet, but that hasn't been fully clarified yet.

That doesn't make sense for stock you'll get in 3 years, as it assumes appreciation in value.

There will be no stock in three years if the acquisition goes through. My understanding is that effort is being made to compensate employees in a roughly equivalent manner, albeit without appreciation or deprecation being involved since Twitter will cease to be a public company.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#35

Post by indigochill »

baby wrote: post #15

Also: what is the point of taking the company private?

At least one point is control. When you're not beholden to shareholders, you can run a company effectively as you see fit. As an employee, I actually look at whether a company is privately or publicly held because I'm of the (possibly mistaken/excessive?) opinion that you cannot run a truly mission-oriented public company (unless that mission is to maximize shareholder value, I suppose, but that's not a particularly compelling mission for me).

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#36

Post by semiquaver »

rmbyrro wrote: post #17

Most agreements have a liquidity event (i.e. an acquisition) clause. They this sort of thing happens, your unvested options can be vested and exercised immediately.

Twitter already had a liquidity event, the IPO. A going-private transaction is unlikely to be contemplated in any existing options or RSU agreement. Unvested options are technically worthless, being an option to purchase securities that will no longer exist (TWTR). In practice it would be very silly to do this to employees unless your explicit goal was to massively reduce headcount.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#37

Post by bdefore »

baby wrote: post #15

Also: what is the point of taking the company private?

I don't have an answer for this, but the richest person in the world has unique motivations other than maintaining a profitable technology business. What if better technology products could be created when divorced from shareholder profits and therefore the influence of advertising? Or if divorced from any government regulation/oversight?

Now that's a big if but IF you run with that as Musk's motivation, then he doesn't particularly care about making Twitter profitable. It'd be more valuable to him as another lever of influence on society generally.

Could Twitter become more than just a brawling drunken town square? Could it capture public goodwill by eradicating advertising from Twitter and offering an open-source encrypted email and messaging service outside the purview of Five Eyes? Then build off the manufacturing innovations Tesla pioneered and create a cheap open hardware phone?

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#38

Post by recuter »

djbebs wrote: post #29
recuter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

Do you also think that you can't just fire 12 floors worth of people?

When has that ever worked out for anybody? What are you even saying, life isn't some sort of Joseph Heller novel bucko. This is the big leagues, you need all those people to keep the trains running on time.

Are you seriously trying to tell me that some smooth operator can just come waltzing into a well oiled operation like Twitter Inc and simply purge thousands of highly skilled specialized knowledge workers assigned to an extremely complicated web scale project willy nilly?

What of all the accumulated institutional knowledge. Countless man (and woman) years of code optimizations. The massive ETL pipelines. The company culture. Truly the most valuable asset Twitter has is the talented people that work there. Surely it would all come crashing down.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#39

Post by simonebrunozzi »

sofixa wrote: post #19
binarymax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best source, however I’m hardened and cynical and what execs “assure” in a meeting has no bearing on what they’ll do in 6 months.

If they're even there in 6 months. Musk can just fire them all and do whatever.

YMMV, but that's what lawyers are for. Not the action of a single individual necessarily, but a group of disgruntled employees can pool their resources and hire a law firm to right a wrong. It's usually worth it when the "wrong" is big enough.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#40

Post by rocqua »

vinay_ys wrote: post #20

It is likely they will try to maintain the total comp levels for at least a year, meanwhile they will reassess the entire talent pool and make whatever correction they deem necessary. Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. If sufficient number of critical talent leave (intentionally or accidentally), it could hurt twitter significantly in the near term. People from other indu…

Your argument that there are key people at twitter that need to stay on to keep up understanding of the code makes sense to me. But I don't think the following quote is true:

> Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there.

I think the main asset of twitter is their userbase and more importantly their brand. The simple fact that twitter is at the core of politics and the news-cycle is where most of the value at twitter comes from. Twitter's engineers are vital to keeping twitter running. But that doesn't make it an asset. It's not something you can sell on or somehow convert into cash.

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