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Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

businessinsider.com

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Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#51

Post by ryanwaggoner »

legitster wrote: post #43
Hamuko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter. Sure, I'd love to work in a company with the guy that couldn't really decide whether or not he wants to go through the agreement he signed, carried toilet furniture in as his first job as the CEO and then is threatening to fire huge amounts of the current employees. I mean, what could possible go wrong?

I know you are trying to be flip here, but I can almost guarantee you that their number of job applicants has probably exploded as a result of these shenanigans.

I seriously doubt that their volume of qualified applicants has exploded. Working at Twitter just isn’t competitive anymore, in terms of comp, WLB, and basic human decency. Unless he’s going to start paying people twice as much, most good engineers will go elsewhere. Maybe he can get away with it for something like self driving cars or rockets, but you want me to work overtime under the threat of a layoff for below market wages for a social network? Laughable.

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#52

Post by ryanwaggoner »

legitster wrote: post #40
Bubble_Pop_22 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are very desirable jobs. People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter. Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk. Time change but history repeats itself . It’s always right wing nuts and generally people who fall for cults who end up in the bunker where they discover that the person whom they thought was god , in reality j…

> Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk. Yes. To the people you and I talk to. But if you talk to a 4th year computer science student at Cal Tech who is already putting in 90 hours of work a week for professors he hates, Twitter just popped on their radar.

Based on what? Why wouldn’t that student go work somewhere with great WLB, more pay, and less stress? What does Musk’s Twitter have to offer?

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#53

Post by ryanwaggoner »

willcipriano wrote: post #41
Bubble_Pop_22 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are very desirable jobs. People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter. Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk. Time change but history repeats itself . It’s always right wing nuts and generally people who fall for cults who end up in the bunker where they discover that the person whom they thought was god , in reality j…

> Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk. You don't talk to any poor people. They already have a bad boss that underpays them, a bad boss that pays them well is a massive upgrade.

Those people can’t do the work in question, or they’d already be employed somewhere doing it. Twitter has paid well because they have to in order to hire good talent, and that won’t change.

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#54

Post by legitster »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #52
legitster wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk. Yes. To the people you and I talk to. But if you talk to a 4th year computer science student at Cal Tech who is already putting in 90 hours of work a week for professors he hates, Twitter just popped on their radar.

Based on what? Why wouldn’t that student go work somewhere with great WLB, more pay, and less stress? What does Musk’s Twitter have to offer?

I won't speak for others but I didn't give a crap about WLB in my 20s. Or job security. I didn't have to be in school anymore!

If the job was fun and you got to work someplace cool that's just gravy - I was more than happy to cut into my video game time.

But even to this day, working 60 hours a week for a place where you can arbitrary push code into production and see what happens IS ALWAYS going to be more fun and rewarding than sitting in a team meeting reviewing the wording on BRDs for 20 hours a week.

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#55

Post by systemvoltage »

memish wrote: post #48
colanderman wrote: post #19

Musk is a bully. Like any bully, he is doing this to find out who is easy to pick on, and will keep them around, while dismissing those who are willing/able to fight back. Life will continue to be miserable to those he keeps around. My advice to all engineers feeling this pressure -- start looking now . Leave as soon as possible. You are more valuable than what Musk thinks of you. Those who are in a position to do so…

The best engineers in the world working at SpaceX and Tesla disagree. Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla, even better) take from a couple days ago on Lex's podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

Honestly, when you’re paying employees $300k packages, arguments that can be made for an Amazon warehouse worker just doesn’t apply here.

I kind of want to apply to Twitter tbh. Sounds like a fun place to work, probably eliminating 90% of the bureaucracy and HR bullshit. Stock alone would be worth it, working with brilliant and motivated people in a high pace environment is becoming rare. Silicon Valley used to do this and it was awesome in the 80’s up until 2000’s.

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#56

Post by nradov »

systemvoltage wrote: post #55
memish wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best engineers in the world working at SpaceX and Tesla disagree. Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla, even better) take from a couple days ago on Lex's podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

Honestly, when you’re paying employees $300k packages, arguments that can be made for an Amazon warehouse worker just doesn’t apply here. I kind of want to apply to Twitter tbh. Sounds like a fun place to work, probably eliminating 90% of the bureaucracy and HR bullshit. Stock alone would be worth it, working with brilliant and motivated people in a high pace environment is becoming rare. Silicon Valley used to do th…

What stock?

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#57

Post by systemvoltage »

memish wrote: post #12
Grim-444 wrote: post #6

"I work at Google and they've told me to work 125 hours weeks". In that statement I provided just as much evidence for my claim as the article does their claim. In fact, there's more proof for my claim since it has a username tied to it, whereas the article just cites anonymous "according to internal sources". And yet, this is an article that how many thousands of people will read, and internalize into their model of…

Especially when you look at how much journalists have gotten wrong the past few days. Ligma and Johnson ("They are visibly shaken"), mass layoffs before Nov 1st (nope), unbanned accounts would be back on by Monday (nope), Elon restored Ye's account (it was restored before the acquisition), Saudi Arabia bought into Twitter (they already were shareholders), etc...

NYT said they’ll have mass layoffs by Nov 1 because of stock compensation expiration. It didn’t happen and Musk refuted it outright.

https://twitter.com/austen/status/1587458237414068224

My generous take on this: Media is incompetent and they need to do more due diligence.

My cynical take on this: Media is losing its power and influence, this is the last ditch effort to smear opponents.

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#59

Post by dropofwill »

memish wrote: post #48
colanderman wrote: post #19

Musk is a bully. Like any bully, he is doing this to find out who is easy to pick on, and will keep them around, while dismissing those who are willing/able to fight back. Life will continue to be miserable to those he keeps around. My advice to all engineers feeling this pressure -- start looking now . Leave as soon as possible. You are more valuable than what Musk thinks of you. Those who are in a position to do so…

The best engineers in the world working at SpaceX and Tesla disagree. Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla, even better) take from a couple days ago on Lex's podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

Acquisition Musk is clearly different than Tesla (I have friends that work at both, day to day experience is nothing alike), maybe Twitter gets to what Karpathy describes, but I'm not convinced his big hammer approach to turning it back into a startup instantly is going to work.

Re: Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks

#60

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #49
mindcrime wrote: post #28

Wow. IF (if!) this is true, I really hope every single Twitter employee sends Musk an email saying "fuck you" and walks out. There's just now call for treating people like this. EDIT: let me expand this to say, it might not be as bad as it sounds if there's some massive reward (beyond just "keeping your job") tied to this or something. And I have no problem working 80+ hours a week.. I do it all the time myself. It's…

Treating people like what? Asking them to be productive and get shit done? Should Musk hand out hugs and participation trophies? Maybe little "You can do it!" stickers? There are 7500 employees at twitter and nobody seems to know what they are working on. The bureaucracy at Twitter was poison and the entire company had lost billions under the old management. The free lunch, wheatgrass smoothies, and safes paces are c…

This is not how you get people productive. This is how you grind them into burnt out husks of themselves and massively hurt company in the long run.
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