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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#621

Post by hodgesrm »

kaashif wrote: post #489
bentt wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…

Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.

> Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment.

+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.

On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#622

Post by Someone1234 »

Bhilai wrote: post #541

Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless souls. FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in…

This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the laid off employees.

It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in sympathy.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#623

Post by suzzer99 »

generalizations wrote: post #463
el_benhameen wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of figured this was part of the goal at Twitter. 75% of staff was the number that was originally floated, so maybe the thinking here is that after a brutal layoff round, another quarter will say “fuck it” and leave.

And after that, the ones who stay are probably the ones most in line with the kind of culture Elon is aiming for.

Or the "lifers" with no other job prospects.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#624

Post by mavhc »

jasmer wrote: post #584
bentt wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…

Twitter is not 'SpaceX' in every way. It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments. Twitter is long, long established as another company. The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer. He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov. I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more pr…

No company would exist with major budgetary support from the government.

Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#625

Post by s1artibartfast »

mlatu wrote: post #250
pavlov wrote: post #68

In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.

didnt elon get a loan from a saudi crownprince and paying interest of around a billion$ per year?

No to both.

The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prin...

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#626

Post by yodsanklai »

lucideer wrote: post #610
nostromo wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government. People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech onl…

> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces Is it though? Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea. Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means... Certainly in the context of Musk's cam…

> Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.

The idea predates the existence of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#627

Post by conductr »

bentt wrote: post #448
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…

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…

> The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people

It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#628

Post by nonethewiser »

john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

This is literally no different than before.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#629

Post by delfinom »

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.

Yea but guess what will come into fashion at that point?

Unions.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#630

Post by yehCuz »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #588
tshaddox wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.

It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political game to me. Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example. Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you…

Elon is heavily dependent on politicians keeping taxes low for billionaires, and policy that pushes NASA and other government agencies to hire private companies.

Crony capitalism it’s called colloquially.

Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was undermining them.

Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in finance changed to “save”, banks raised rates on savings accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.

Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers most likely to be hurt long term.

So yeah it’s basically division politics. The only reason it works like this is because of memory this is how it works.

NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher and higher wages is what’s creating inflation, and they want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down. Manufacturing consent by repeating “truth”.

Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions. They are protecting the net worth class based system that keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which families thrive or die.

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