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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

#301

Post by danans »

slg wrote: post #208

Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure…

> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed.

He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.

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

#302

Post by avian »

rgovostes wrote: post #152

> 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…

> some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants

My reaction when I get the fire hydrants/traffic lights/whatever thing is to not bother and close the site. It's not because I can't spare two seconds, but because from past experience I know that whenever I get this it's an unending captcha hell.

It seems that these days the only time you're given a captcha is when some AI somewhere already decided that you're a bad actor and won't let you to the site, no matter how diligently you keep clicking page after pages of challenges.

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

#303

Post by ideaz »

alistairSH wrote: post #275

So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other billionaires on the other side of the country. And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason. What an absolute knob. Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of…

Maybe in his genius mind thats how he will get them to buy more Teslas.

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

#304

Post by School-Cotton »

unwind wrote: post #139
csmpltn wrote: post #106

Here's a cool and perhaps unforeseen hypothetical turn-of-events: 100% of Twitter's staff give their resignation letter on Friday, and don't show up to work. Leadership wakes up to a collapsing platform, a 44 billion USD bill to pay, with no one to keep the lights on or answer the PagerDuty alerts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes? No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team members". You jus…

Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on? I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications. Just a thought,…

> Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?

No. The vast majority of tech jobs are “at-will” on both sides: either party can terminate the relationship at any moment.

Giving two weeks’ notice is a cultural norm.

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

#305

Post by boredtofears »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #276
boredtofears wrote: post #89

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.

Wait, so you have an employee that can get all their work done using 20% of their working hours and then spend the rest of their day ensuring they don't burn out and you want to become adversarial to that employee? Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate issue from the video itself…

You're missing several other options:

B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are therefore meaningless.

C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.

My hunch is that its a combination of these two.

I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.

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

#306

Post by andrew_ »

jesuscript wrote: post #273
slg wrote: post #208

Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure…

Quoted post unavailable.

These kinds of faux insights are shallow.

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

#307

Post by andsoitis »

klodolph wrote: post #218
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #194

According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive: > That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our r…

Revenue of $5bn. Let’s say that you burn half of it down, so you’re making $2.5bn with ads, and $2.5bn with subscriptions. If there 200M DAU, then that means you want to make $12.5/year, per user, for subscriptions. I don’t see how that would be possible, even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios.

One area Twitter hasn’t excelled in is adding new users.

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

#308

Post by spaniard89277 »

throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #213

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?

Ive got covid last friday at my office. Large gathering of people without proper ventilation.

Now my company has to pay me while I'm laying in bed writing this as I'm not capable of doing much useful.

Im not a dev but a technician, I just solve tickets throug a computer. We never were more prodictive not had so much income. What was the point?

I won't sabotage this company but honestly, all companies doing this feel like they play their employees because they can.

If they want to treat me like this, then I don't see why should care about the business and not try to game the system as much as I can.

It's been hard because I have a work ethic, but cmon.

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

#309

Post by jmiskovic »

VLM wrote: post #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…

Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?

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

#310

Post by davesque »

throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #213

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?

Haven't you ever been forced into a situation that turned out to be better in certain ways?

For many people, discovering the quality of life improvements afforded by remote work, that were forced on us by COVID, has been a blessing. Many have reasonably argued that there wasn't much loss in productivity compared with the huge boon in life satisfaction resulting from remote work.

Your comment doesn't respond to the opposing view as though it could be reasonable.

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