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Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

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Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#261

covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it anymore. so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?

Most companies already realized remote working doesn't work out. Hard to admit but it is the truth.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#262

Remote work is about the only thing where I very much disagree with Musk. I get it for engineering physical things. But not for web software. In that area, remote works much better than in-office, at least for me.

I agree, but I think either full on-site or fully remote are both leagues better than partially remote. Partially remote is far worse than either - because now all the in-person tactics exclude the remote folks, and all the remote work tactics are an unnecessary burden to the in-office folks. An all-remote team of heads-down engineers is 99% as good as in-person, if not better, because now all the communication has b…

Nevermind that in a partial remote scenario, like anywhere from 20-80% of the staff are wfh on any given day.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#263

I have to admit if I was an executive and I watched one of those "day in the life of" tiktoks from twitter employees that show them spending maybe 20% of their day doing work and the other 80% enjoying company amenities I might be considering tightening things up as well.

Link to video for anyone who didn't see it yet (like me): https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#264
post #60

At this point why would anyone want to stay at twitter? The mood must be absolutely abysmal.

Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that. On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone come in and clean house / shake things up would be very exciting.

Yes, I cannot wait for the chance to take my own company's legal liability onto my own shoulders so I can prove how faithful I am to my new leader!!

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#265

> over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam. Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because som…

I spent less than a dollar one day to automate solving some stupid government website form that i was scraping data from. I have no experience in that but it was pretty easy and captchas are close to worthless for any bad actor with even half a brain

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#266
post #109
post #23

I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective. I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when workin…

My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United States then people in the highest markets would get significant drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than the average worker doing the same work over…

It's not like your income is scaled to the housing costs though. I just checked craigslist for Los angeles and Columbus, Ohio. 1 bedroom average in LA is $2000 and change, Columbus its $1000. For a year in the average 1 bedroom, you are only paying $12k more or so for the unit in LA. Other costs are about the same, the same MSRP for consumer goods, about the same grocery bill (certain food is honestly very cheap in LA due to its year round availability), about the same $10 pints of beers and $12 entrees at your typical late 20s and up drinking/eating establishment.

Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.

I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#267

covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it anymore. so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?

> so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?

Because we like the new normal.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#268

The one-sidedness of the comments in this thread surprise me. If you want to work remotely, don’t work at Twitter. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it’s more beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people to work towards those goals. Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To give my opinion, if…

It is my understanding that Twitter has been extremely friendly towards remote work.

Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman cruelty without empathy. I’m not even taking any kind of legal perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to employee’s lives can be enormous.

I’m so happy to live in a country where this would be quite illegal to do.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#269
Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.

You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.

Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.

What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.

All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?

Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#270
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies. However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.

Quoted post unavailable.

pending his own money to pay the employee

If you're claiming his paying them out-of-pocket, can you provide a citation?

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