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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#451

Post by contravariant »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #414
KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

Twitter employees were treated nicely. Too nicely. And yet they were not productive. The only new features they introduced in 10 years were losses in excess of 200MM to 1bn+ and the banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo. Each staffer had 10 bosses and every department had a ton of waste. Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the company woul…

Valid or not you do hit upon something I'm genuinely curious about. What do developers for something like twitter even do?

Twitter does one very specific thing, and it doesn't look like it has changed its goal much over the past 10 years, so what is it they're trying to develop so rapidly they need hundreds (thousands?) of developers.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#452

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

This is the part that concerns me as well. WFH was a fluke of sorts and the timing allowed a lot of workforce to maintain rather adamant pose. My company's management is already using all the 'key' words in meetings like 'in person collaboration' and so on suggesting they are planning an RTO.

They just don't seem to dare to do it yet, because they poached a whole lot of people from companies that did RTO. This would like leave a bad impression.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#453

Post by golemotron »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

> The issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.

It's never been in fashion on the whole. Tech is little privileged bubble in the work world with little exposure to what happens outside of it.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#454

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

I don't get all this antipathy towards what Musk is doing. It's an established maxim of the venerated Warren Buffet that the very first thing you need to do after buying a company is clean house, and get rid of the people who put it in the shape that made it buyable to begin with, starting, and especially, at the top.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#455

Post by jlangenauer »

falcolas wrote: post #397
edderly wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

> I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple. When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.

Twitter has around 190m daily active users. You're going to struggle to run something like that with an engineering team of 20-30 people (although WhatsApp did exactly that for many years), sure.

But I don't see why an company and an application of that size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people, instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#456

Post by nfRfqX5n »

nxmnxm99 wrote: post #394
KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

Quoted post unavailable.

Gotta work harder to make those shareholders more money

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#457

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

bioemerl wrote: post #255
losvedir wrote: post #180

And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…

This isn't a too great demonstration of "you only need" because there will be a lot of brain drain issues with this company, worry and drama internally resulting in bad productivity.

He sought out the drama so if he's capable he should've predicted it and been fine with it because he has ways to resolve it, something like that.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#459

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

alistairSH wrote: post #403

And the class action for WARN Act violations has already been filed. Sounds like the Chief Twit didn't give 60 days warning OR severance, as required by law. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...

And we all know that fines are just fees for rich people.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#460

Post by lumost »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

I suspect that part of this is a re-buttle to WFH. In the past, managers generally could see who was doing what. Now it's based on trust. If someone decides to watch TV all day while sometimes checking slack... well then they can. No one ever had any idea how long coding tasks took anyway. Some people are doing fine in this new world, and some are struggling. Whether I'm succeeding or struggling depends on the day.
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