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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

#561

Post by pcurve »

kypro wrote: 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…

Rest of the world has largely gone back to office to work now, even if it is part time.

I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.

For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.

My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.

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

#562

Post by chinabot »

seydor wrote: post #506
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…

But it s not a neutral decision. It is likely you are left with the employees who are willing to tolerate a worse lifestyle for the paycheck, and you are letting go employees who are smart enough to prefer to have more control of their lives.

I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk to take over.

Musk is his own worst enemy and can be a douche a lot of the time but he doesn't deserve this toxic personal shit for trying to sort out the mess. Also as I remember once he saw past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.

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

#563

Post by misiti3780 »

autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top…

All of the people (or most of the people) that matter would not have left Twitter for Elon's new company. Tons of people have tried this.

Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off the ground and it had a ton of YC press.

Network affects are real.

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

#564

Post by asdff »

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…

>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.

The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place.

Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.

Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.

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

#565

Post by [deleted] »

sangnoir wrote: post #441
jesuscript wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> He wants to show he can spend that kind of money[...] Reminder: he expressly did not want to spend that kind of money but was forced to after facing a near-certain defeat in Delaware court. I wasn't expecting the events to be mythologized beyond recognition within weeks.

[deleted]

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

#566

Post by lovich »

danans wrote: post #301
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 someho…

Making a bunch of unpopular changes and waiting a month still seems more prudent. The people most likely carrying that culture are gonna be the ones most inclined to leave over changes, and if they are leaving on their own that would decrease costs associated with benefits or the increase to the unemployment tax that comes with layoffs

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

#567

Post by gw98 »

abxytg wrote: post #481

Or -- he's stupid.

I suspect this is the real problem.

Stupid people with money can look like they are clever because the layer of people immediately underneath them actually wields the clue stick.

Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't afford the layer of clever people underneath them.

Clever people are either abstracting the liability via stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with designing and building products with the other clever people around them.

Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.

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

#568

Post by PartiallyTyped »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #435
danans wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 someho…

Seems like he's trying to speed run employees jumping ship - I'm surprised he didn't try these tactics for a month or two before firing a bunch of people and paying severance.

He actually did,

June 16, 2022:

Elon Musk plans to use remote work as a reward at Twitter—but only for ‘exceptional’ employees

https://fortune.com/2022/06/16/elon-musk-twitter-remote-work...

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

#569

Post by orangepurple »

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.”

Steel is forged in a fire regardless. Forged steel hardens with cycles of annealing and stress. Which is exactly what layoffs are. Cycles of heating and cooling. Lol

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

#570

Post by Barrin92 »

cmh89 wrote: post #525
mastazi wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first this was my thinking as well, but then towards the end of the article, the author mentions an "all hands meeting" he had with employees before completing the acquisition, and apparently he said in that occasion that he was against remote work. Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company. [1] i.e. almost…

Getting rid of remote work is an excellent way to chase away your best employees while retaining people with nowhere to go.

the correlation in my experience is if anything the other way around. The best and most productive employees tend to be involved and in-person is still the best way to get things done and actually exchange ideas. This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about, remote work is awful for productivity and it's most popular among the "least amount of effort" crowd. It's also why almost any major tech company after covid is trying to scale remote work back again.
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