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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#771

Post by idlewords »

dangerwill wrote: post #755
idlewords wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those techies had years in which to organize their workplace under US labor law to forestall exactly this kind of outcome. For the past 20 years, there was no group of employees on earth with more latent power than US tech workers, but this very fact blinded them to the possibility that they might ever lose this power. What feeble efforts there were at collective action were organized around divisive "social justice"…

Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up, the industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years of anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you well paid, lazy programmers ask for even more"). Especially here in HN given its hyper-capitalist slant. I think it's a bit disingenuous to put all of the blame on tech workers

Is the argument here that capital should have been more supportive and nurturing? Imagine if the OG labor movement had been such hothouse flowers.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#772

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

hankerito wrote: post #521
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #454

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.

I would say, a lot of it has to do with style? Even if something is necessary - and I have now idea if it is - but even if, there are better, more friendly and respectful ways of dealing with all of this right?

You suggest you don't even know if it's necessary to cut staff, but if you had bought Twitter, currently losing money for 3 years in a row, what would you do to turn the ship around more "respectfully?"

I think most people who are whinging about this -- especially here, on this forum -- are people who wouldn't think twice, if this were happening at any other big "Web 2.0" company. And, in fact, they'd probably cheer on the "decisive" and "courageous" leadership. I think they just don't like Musk, and don't like that he's bought Twitter, because they believe the narrative -- as I've seen many people suggest -- that it's going to somehow veer hard right, and become 4chan 2.0.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#773

Post by sequoia »

neel8986 wrote: post #614

The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public…

"The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful."

Sorry I may have missed this in the article–was it something beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to me) but it's a normal part of business operations.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#774

Post by ehfeng »

padheyam wrote: post #756
yummies wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

Agree re: the less sinister explanation. I think only this particular tweet has been removed and the other tweets referred in the article are still up.

Hanlon's razor except s/stupidity/corporate policy/g.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#775

Post by tshaddox »

bsagdiyev wrote: post #694
tshaddox wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don’t fire that last person or else you’ll get a divide by zero error.) Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free s…

Activists: take credit Some dude: "it's totally not them!" Why would he not think that?

I'll ignore for the moment questions about what "activists" is supposed to mean and whether it refers to a real group capable of making unified decisions. Regardless, it's just not great for leadership to blame a revenue drop on unrelated third parties even if those third parties are working against the company and taking credit for the revenue drop. This isn't like complaining that trolls came in and review bombed your movie on IMDb. Revenue is an actual metric. If the claim is that the revenue numbers are only very briefly down because advertisers are only pulling spend in response to some temporary PR issue, then sure, make that argument.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#777

Post by htrp »

curiousllama wrote: post #548
bichiliad wrote: post #344

When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected. I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just because they liked their coworkers and are sad…

The rule of thumb is ~1/3 of the layoff size will be incremental attrition over the next 6-12 months. If they hired a firm that knows what it's doing, they build it into the model.

i don't think they hired a firm to plan this out.... and if they did, no sane firm would float you a 7 day timeline

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#778

Post by harlequinn77 »

toofy wrote: post #707
PM_me_your_math wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcers: "Those are the rules" Everyone: what about our freedom of speech? Enforcers: those are our rules New Boss: You're playing by my rules now Ex-enforcers: what bout our freedom of speech? New Boss: Welcome to your machine

so the new boss doesn’t actually believe in the ideology he loudly preaches?

And the censors don't like being censored. Everyone is a hypocrite

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#779

Post by nomel »

rockostrich wrote: post #337
mikkergp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he…

I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla…

> you can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff

Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens" was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your definition of "product".

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#780

Post by tshaddox »

yummies wrote: post #639
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…

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

> It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack).

It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

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