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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

#71
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hey, i didn't know that guy started a new boot camp. what happened to lambda school?

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

#72
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Media organizations are distraught over losing control of the gated institutional narrative. The disintermediation process is continuing and many "news" media outlets have debased themselves to the point that they now write low-effort articles about what's trending on Twitter. To their credit, the New York Times still does a little bit of real investigative journalism. But their standards are low and they tend to unc…

I completely and totally agree. They have been replaced as the gatekeepers for public "information" and are now seen as a sloppy middleman with a penchant for lying and pushing absurd narratives people with common sense wouldn't buy in a heartbeat. Its why trust in these sad institutions are near a record low:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...

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

#73
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My take is that the person screen-shotted a pretty carefully chosen part of the actual article.

The actual article contextualizes the event as "Elon Musk planned to begin laying off workers at Twitter as soon as Saturday, four people with knowledge of the matter said, with some managers being asked to draw up lists of employees to cut."

So of course this screenshot this person tweeted takes a paragraph from the middle, out of context, which makes it seem like a blanket, unqualified assertion.

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

#74
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…

This is how reporting works. I know Business Insider and believe it is pretty above board. Business Insider is basically citing CNBC, which is pretty above board. These are two of the shrinking list of organizations that actually practice journalism. CNBC, meanwhile, is citing multiple employees who feared to put their names on record for fear of retaliation. CNBC, on top of that, says in the article that they were able to review internal communications.

If that kind of reporting is below the bar for evidence, then a lot of abuses will never see the light of day.

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

#75
post #64

I think people might be missing the point here. Elon probably wants higher turnover. These are very desirable jobs. People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter. Younger, cheaper people who have strong ideas of how to fix Twitter and would actually try to push these ideas. And these seats are currently filled with older, expensive employees who like things the way they are averse to things breaking. Either tha…

> Younger, cheaper people who have strong ideas of how to fix Twitter and would actually try to push these ideas. That's... horrifying, to be honest. Imagine the kind of young, cheap, starry-eyed people who think they know how to fix Twitter. Now, imagine a subgroup of these people who look at Musk's antics and decide "Oh this is the kind of company I'd love to work for." Well, at least the eventual Netflix documenta…

the word I think we might be searching for is predatory.

take people with no experience, no peers left to tell them better, and construct a complete new reality bubble with no continuity & no lessons of the past remaining. do what thou wilt with them.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the lowest unemployment numbers in USA. That might be an issue. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/05/1116036160/the-unemployment-r...

To be fair, NPR is state media and the state has a motive for stating certain things that mispresent the truth.

LMAO, the earth is flat too, right?

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

#77

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. 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.

.... you don't actually believe that do you? There are very few positions in rich, big companies and many many people competing for them. Many people could do those jobs but are unable to get in for a variety of life reasons.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> 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.

This only works for subscale businesses. Once a company becomes big enough, that kind of approach ends up causing production outages, private data spillage, or PR / customer / regulatory shitstorms about changes that went in without anyone else being briefed about them. It's fine if you don't have a lot of demanding users or social relevance but I don't think this would be a wise direction for something the size of Twitter

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, NPR is state media and the state has a motive for stating certain things that mispresent the truth.

LMAO, the earth is flat too, right?

LMAO, no, but your reasoning is.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.... you don't actually believe that do you? There are very few positions in rich, big companies and many many people competing for them. Many people could do those jobs but are unable to get in for a variety of life reasons.

That’s fair, when I said they “can’t do those jobs”, I meant a combination of “they can’t do and / or can’t get hired for those jobs”, and I don’t see why Twitter slashing staff, requiring more work, and likely paying less is going to change that.

Why would a job at Twitter be more accessible to someone in 2023 than it was in 2021?

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