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

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by AlphaSite »

dragonwriter wrote: post #640
ericmcer wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision. Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquito…

> Twitter isn’t going to disappear You seem more confident than Musk is reported to have been in today's sudden all-hands meeting; what do you know that Musk doesn’t? EDIT: see, e.g., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/musk-tell...

He has a pattern where attempts to create false peril in an effort to motivate people. Which is maybe telling about his managerial style that he relays on fear rather than inspiration.

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

#862

Post by paxys »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #847
throwayyy479087 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been told many times that Twitter is a private company and can do whatever it wants. Or does that only apply to the Red team?

Does "whatever it wants" include making contractual promises and then breaking them? Because I wasn't aware private companies had the right to rescind contracts at will.

Well legally speaking in the US they do have that right.

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

#863

Post by RavingGoat »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #539
jedberg wrote: post #496

The number one result when you search for Twitter on HN: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever (buzzfeednews.com) 2953 points by minimaxir on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 1353 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647

I’ve been told many times that Twitter is a private company and can do whatever it wants. Or does that only apply to the Red team?

Lots of spineless throwaway accounts in these threads

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

#864

Post by monksy »

philliphaydon wrote: post #829
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.

In 2020 the company I worked for did ~25% temp salary reduction so they could feel safe that they could keep everyone employed and such. 3 months after everyone did it they said "thank you thank you we are so happy we don't need to let anyone go". 2 months later they laid off ~50% of the development team and people throughout the company... At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying desp…

Zebra did a 5% salary cut during the start of the pandemic while saving costs on the offices, forced a pto burn, hiring freeze, and then had to spend $500 million to buy another company it wanted to buy.

These large companies are struggling.

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

#866

Post by roughly »

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #625
roughly wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. N…

> Could you give me an example from the USA?

Sure: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1590746170438975488

> 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.

Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse, as a brand that’s mostly tried to avoid Nazi connections over the last 70-odd years?

> They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends.

Two points here: First, I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it. As a corporate money-making entity, Twitter is concerned about maximizing its user base, and if blocking the neo-nazi means 3 other people stay on the platform, by golly that’s the move Twitter Inc the business will make. It turns out speech is sometimes zero-sun or worse: one person’s instance of free speech makes another person feel like their life is in danger.

Second, Twitter’s customer is not you, nor the public, nor democracy. Twitter’s customer is Ford, and if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things like LGBTQ rights and immigration, at least at a surface level, are better for their global brand than not, so Twitter’s content moderation strategy will reflect that. Most of the people complaining about Twitter’s content moderation strategy were already mad at Cheerios for running ads celebrating gay marriage, so it‘s hard to say they’ve really missed the mark here.

Again, Twitter is an advertising company whose supply is “users”, and they need the maximal supply of palatable (read: users without paired lightning bolts in their bio) users for their customers, Advertisers. That’s what the platform is, that’s what their business is, and that’s who they’re moderating content for.

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

#867

Post by rsj_hn »

monksy wrote: post #864
philliphaydon wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020 the company I worked for did ~25% temp salary reduction so they could feel safe that they could keep everyone employed and such. 3 months after everyone did it they said "thank you thank you we are so happy we don't need to let anyone go". 2 months later they laid off ~50% of the development team and people throughout the company... At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying desp…

Zebra did a 5% salary cut during the start of the pandemic while saving costs on the offices, forced a pto burn, hiring freeze, and then had to spend $500 million to buy another company it wanted to buy. These large companies are struggling.

In what I guess is confusing to many, when a company buys another company, or even purchases capital equipment of some kind, it can finance that by a loan, and the result is that the asset side of the ledger doesn't take a hit. But when a company pays salary, it can't finance that with a loan, as expenditures on salary do cause the asset side to take a hit. This is the difference.

I understand that to many people they seem like they are in the same category of "spending money" but spending money on an income earning investment is not the same as spending money on operating expenses.

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

#868

Post by propogandist »

ldbooth wrote: post #758

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.

it's almost like the headline that was buried about Twitter and Facebook colluding with Biden's DHS to "police disinformation", where social media companies were shills for government propaganda

> the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

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

#869

Post by lokedhs »

14u2c wrote: post #757
slg wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may become the case in the US, but in places like Sweden you have to announce long before the actual layoffs to give the unions a chance to negotiate.

I went through a layoff where they announced they had to make major reductions in headcount (it ended up being about 30% but I'm not sure that number was announced). There was then several months of discussions with the unions before they announced who had to leave.

If you were not impacted they didn't tell you anything until the announcement. The people who were impacted had been briefed beforehand. As I was staying on I didn't know anything, which was stressful, but I guess that if I had known about the process it would have been less so.

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

#870

Post by propogandist »

hutzlibu wrote: post #321
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 does this has to do with Twitter stopping remote, which to me is simply a statement of control freak Elon and nothing else.

the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.
Post reply on HN