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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

#381

Post by colinloretz »

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…

not likely, subscriptions are very mature on YouTube and still only make up a tiny percentage of revenue. MKBHD did a good video breaking this down across other social networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c

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

#382

Post by eli »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #372
ok_dad wrote: post #357

Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was: 1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's cry…

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.

And how's that been going so far?

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

#383

Post by pasquinelli »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #343
cokeandpepsi wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021 Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry s…

Twitter employees: “we’re going to vote to unionize” When you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn’t you? It brings the federal government in to provide support, on their dime no less. Worst case is everyone leaves, the NLRB finds against Musk, and he has to give folks their jobs back while Twitter is burning. “The strongest steel is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”

in that case it's good remote work won't be happening there. it's hard for remote workers to get organized.

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

#384

Post by ben_w »

coffeeblack wrote: post #125

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.

Ironically, the Tesla robots would (with a VR headset) enable physical-thing workers to work remotely.

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

#385

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

boredtofears wrote: post #305
JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (ass…

I am not missing those options at all. It's just that the video is not the issue nor the way time can be spent at the company. If your metrics for evaluating performance is wrong that should be addressed before becoming adversarial to your employees based on a flawed perception.

And if there isn't enough work to justify a FTE, then again your metrics are bad. The forecast was not accurate enough. And the only way to know if that's true or not is to fix the formula, do the math again, and figure out the truth.

In both scenarios the employee isn't necessarily the problem, or even a problem at all.

And if we take a step back and evaluate the source material, it's a TikTok video. It's meant to be content. Do we even know if the employee is really only working 20% of the time? We aren't getting a 16 hour live stream here, it's short form content. The truth of the matter is heavily obscured.

It just seems like a bad idea to me to base you're business decisions around a TikTok video, especially when it's one that is adversarial to your employees. Instead, spend the time to understand the reality. Like we might find that the employee is actually working 90% of their workday. And then suddenly you're making decisions that never need to be made in the first place.

> 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.

Depends heavily on function. Plenty of roles are somewhat peaks and valleys of backlogged work. There might be times where some employees really can get their work done using 20% of their day, but then at a different stage they would need to use way more than 20%.

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

#386

Post by heyitsguay »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #372
ok_dad wrote: post #357

Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was: 1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's cry…

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.

Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor, this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The ship needs to do something new, and this is something new, but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.

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

#387

Post by lbhdc »

cokeandpepsi wrote: post #327
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…

Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021 Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry s…

What is the source for this conversation?

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

#389

Post by nxm »

eli wrote: post #382
hallway_monitor wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.

And how's that been going so far?

It’s been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as others like Meta are) to ease the cost drain.

Give Musk a chance… guy knows how to build and grow companies

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

#390

Post by datalopers »

elorant wrote: post #351

According to the email, Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue. Assuming that Twitter’s revenue is around $5bn, and the subscription is at $8/month that’s some 26M subscriptions, or 5,7% of its users. I don’t think that a number so high is achievable, unless they pull a rabbit out of their hat.

You're making the assumption that annualized revenue hasn't already dropped precipitously due to a loss in advertising dollars, and the bar for subscriptions to reach 50% is rapidly lowering.
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