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

751–760 of 1001 posts

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

#751

Post by nickstinemates »

bottlepalm wrote: post #518
fnordpiglet wrote: post #500

Is there any reason for anyone to stay at twitter? I’ve not seen Musk offer any upside anywhere to remaining. He’s laying out a stark plan of hard work and fewer benefits and a brutal management. What reason other than inability to find another job (perhaps due to visa status, the hiring freezes at end of year, and layoffs) does anyone have for working at twitter now? I’m shocked if they don’t see another 50+% volunt…

Even though the pay is lower and hours longer - at his other companies they offered stock options that at least 20x’d over the past 10 years at SpaceX and Tesla. If the employees at Twitter think under Musk’s leadership that they can grow the company to 200 billion or more - then yea it’d be worth staying to collect stock that no one else can get now. Hopefully they’re giving the remaining employees generous stock aw…

Would be interesting to know if the company is recapitalized/option pool reset and what the new deal is for the remaining employees in terms of options like a traditional startup.

Would lend credence to the belief to have outsized returns for the brutality.

I'd also imagine if this ends in a positive financial turnaround, against all expectations of the peanut gallery, it would be a really impressive career achievement.

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

#752

Post by throw8383833jj »

fortydegrees wrote: post #676
throw8383833jj wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done, it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not th…

Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.

Yup! That gives you an idea of roughly how much it costs to acquire customers and Keep them!

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

#753

Post by kcplate »

randomguy0 wrote: post #57

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…

I love working remotely, I definitely feel like I am more productive and pretty much all of my colleagues feel the same way. Perhaps individually, we all are more productive. However, that said…as a team we are simply not as productive as we were prior to the pandemic. No one wants to acknowledge it, but it’s true. I suspect we are not the only ones.

At some point someone in a decision making role is going to see it too, and at that time we will all be disappointed.

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

#754

Post by misiti3780 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #722
misiti3780 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017): > "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber a…

are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?

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

#755

Post by strangescript »

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…

Truth is he probably wanted to eliminate even more staff than he did. It seems like he wants to get the smallest possible team that can keep the core product of twitter running, platform for posting small content blocks.

He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.

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

#756

Post by joshstrange »

jackmott42 wrote: post #721
gw98 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX, built both companies into unlikely leaders in their industry with powerful people trying to crush them all the way, while being a total idiot. A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very good at leading a company to build actual hardware that has to solve hard physics p…

> It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX

If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. I'm not talking about in layman's terms, I'm talking about the actual science that goes into it. Same deal with car design. I'll give Elon props for having a vision and pushing it forward but let's not say ridiculous things like "lead rocket designer at spaceX". That's like thinking Tim Cook could write a line of Swift if his life depended on it or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works. I don't exactly begrudge them for that (I won't get into profit sharing, or the lack there of at most companies) but let's not pretend that Elon is himself coming up with revolutionary ideas. Putting his money behind this is laudable, at some level, but he didn't invent these things any more than Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone.

We here on HN should know better than most how "worthless" an idea is on it's own. It's about execution. And Elon gets props for his execution (in this case hiring people who did the real work) but he shouldn't get all the credit for the work of the actual engineers.

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

#757

Post by 14u2c »

slg wrote: post #687
georgyo wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that did this in 2009. The problem with this method is that many people DID relocate to keep their jobs. And then were layed off two months later. Imagine uplifting your life for your job, and then being told you need to find a new job anyway.

Well yes, the actual best approach for the wellbeing of employee is to combine these two moves. Give employees the choice between taking a voluntary severance package or coming back to the office. Make it known that a round of layoffs is possible depending on the number of people who take the severance. That way no one is misled into moving and the company doesn't have to be as concerned with the distribution of peop…

I don't think I've ever seen a company leave a question of "possible" layoffs up in the air like that. If they happen the announcement is made the same day, otherwise you have people questioning their employment for months.

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

#758

Post by ldbooth »

The timing of this is the content - not the ending of remote work issue. It's using the news cycle and a hot button issue (end remote work) to bury the regulatory liability of the headline of the 3 chief complaince officers resignation the day before a FTC complaince filing.

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

#759

Post by jprd »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #353
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…

A long standing maneuver that companies have is the "your job is now in Houston" when you live in New York. This has an interesting side effect of basically removing anyone from your company who is old enough to have a family with kids in school, wife working etc. Basically it "legally" removes the older more expensive employees. RTO will remove people also like you said, but I wonder what demographic?

COUGH! IBM! COUGH! GE!

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

#760

Post by ra0x3 »

strangescript wrote: post #755
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…

Truth is he probably wanted to eliminate even more staff than he did. It seems like he wants to get the smallest possible team that can keep the core product of twitter running, platform for posting small content blocks. He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with…

This this this. Musk isn't trying to win a popularity contest. He's trying to narrow staff down to that 10% that can do 80% and build back from there. A very cutthroat capitalist approach, but was anyone expecting anything else from the guy who ordered TSLA employees back into factories during covid?
Post reply on HN