Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

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

#621

Post by danans »

nitwit005 wrote: post #590
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…

Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time. I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.

> Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time.

Yes, he's probably screwed either way. Sucks that others are getting screwed as a result of his choices.

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

#622

Post by lmm »

chinabot wrote: post #562
seydor wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I can sympathise with this, but that's if anything anticorrelated with coming into the office - the people who work the least are those who make the most effort at being seen.

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

#623

Post by jmyeet »

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…

If you view every employee as interchangeable this makes sense. Clearly that isn't the case.

What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.

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

#624

Post by wingworks »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #583
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…

> 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. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thous…

Allot of how Elon handled the layoffs from what's public doesn't sound ideal. But also idk how many of those people would've had a job at twitter for much longer anyway. We get a post in HN every other day at the moment of x company laying of 1000 of people.

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

#625

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

roughly wrote: post #401
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? Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.

> an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi

Could you give me an example from the USA?

> your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near]

The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.

> Twitter does content moderation.

Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts.

To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.

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

#626

Post by heavyset_go »

lovich wrote: post #566
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…

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

Changes to terms of employment make employees who quit because of them eligible to collect unemployment. It's one of the few reasons workers are eligible for unemployment when they voluntarily quit.

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

#628

Post by seaman1921 »

renewiltord wrote: post #379
philistine wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not mince words, and talk about his real world lived experience: he treats people like apartheid-era South Africa.

Ah yes. Little is known about apartheid-era SA but the one thing we all know is that when you were fired, they paid you for 2 months and provided healthcare.

take people out of their comfy lives for 2 days and they feel their petty problems are comparable to apartheid-era SA

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

#629

Post by ClumsyPilot »

poszlem wrote: post #517
abxytg wrote: post #481

Or -- he's stupid.

What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them". [1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some appl…

> Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin are "stupid"

So Russia has all the natural resources you could wish for, economy the size of Italy's, economic crisis, most corruption in human history, and is currently loosing a war fighting a smaller country with weapons made 60 years ago.

Please remind me where is the genius I am missing?

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

#630

Post by thedorkknight »

luckylion wrote: post #465
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…

Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption? When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?

Military aircraft carriers are going to operate in a manner completely different from boats carrying skipping containers, if we're going with this analogy. The number of social media companies Musk had any experience running prior to buying Twitter is 0.
Post reply on HN