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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

#921

Post by seanhunter »

Barrin92 wrote: post #570
cmh89 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

In person is the best way for professional meeting attendees to appear to be contributing while simultaneously wasting the time of the people who actually get things done.

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

#922

Post by [deleted] »

sixothree wrote: post #878
memish wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's intellectual dishonest to the extreme to say he's stupid. If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so." Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed…

Have you listened to him speak for any length of time? It's painful.

[deleted]

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

#923

Post by dehrmann »

valbaca wrote: post #714

It's pretty obvious that Musk is willfully (or ignorantly) forcing people out of the company in order to pre-filter before layoffs. If you're at Twitter and can get a job elsewhere, don't panic. Save up, apply elsewhere, quiet-quit but DO NOT QUIT. Make them fire you or lay you off. MAKE them payout the severance! Don't let Musk toss you out for free.

> MAKE them payout the severance!

Most states don't require any severance. The WARN act creates de facto 60 days, but if you can keep it below the threshold or show that the firing was with cause (like if you quiet quit), it won't even count against that.

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

#924

Post by piva00 »

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…

That seemed to be the plan since April per chats between Musk and Jason Calacanis [1]:

> Day zero

> Sharpen your blades boys

> 2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary departures

[1] https://muskmessages.com/d/34.html

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

#925

Post by sytelus »

nomagicbullet wrote: post #838
adamredwoods wrote: post #398

Marissa Mayers and Yahoo in 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi... https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...

I hope our leaders are measuring the right things. It's discouraging to read how Mayers came to her decision to ban remote work. > She said the decision stemmed from her first few months at Yahoo, when she was spending a couple of hours every day in the cafeteria talking to any employee who wanted to chat. Selection bias. > Mayer decided on the ban after spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were…

During pandemic there was published paper (in nature?) that collected and analyzed thousands of employee data and arrived at same conclusion. It’s hard to stay disciplined when working remotely, apparently. However, I don’t think remote-only startups suffers from same issue. Moving traditional office employee to remote suddenly would be problematic unless there was a proper training for setting up home office, meeting etiquette, setting up cultural expectations etc.

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

#926

Post by roelschroeven »

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.

What makes you think Musk successfully selected the best people to stay? How could he even, in that short amount of time? That Twitter had to bring fired people back because it turned out that they were essential after all, indicates the opposite.

> 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.

You remember wrong. It was Musk who insisted he wanted to buy, offered a ridiculously high price, and waived due diligence. The board didn't want to sell, initially resisted, but had to agree to Musk's high offer because they represent the shareholders and have to act in their best interest.

Only after the deal was done did Musk want to back out. That's not how it works. There's plenty of opportunity to due diligence and some serious thinking before you sign a big deal like that. Smart business people, or even normal business people actually, take advantage of that. Musk didn't, and he has only himself to blame.

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

#927

Post by amanaplanacanal »

karaterobot wrote: post #833
yrgulation wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Highest impact is mid project. You know, to make it hurt.

Right, really punish the rest of the team who has to make up for your absence. That'll teach Elon.

They could certainly leave too.

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

#928

Post by throwawaylinux »

stickfigure wrote: post #895
janoc wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want. That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this. Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many people are going to think twice about signing up to work for a company and owner that have a reputation for treating people as disposable trash. Employees are…

> That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this. Just a data point, but Twitter is now much more interesting to me (as a place of work) than it was before. Which is to say, it went from zero interest to "maybe?" * Chaos provides opportunities to make real changes instead of being just a tiny cog doing what you're told. * Advancement is going to be faster in a fast-changing organizatio…

I agree. I still don't think I could bring myself to work for an adtech company, but pre-Musk twitter seemed particularly bad. Bloated, slow-moving, and stale, no direction, no vision. And if the vlogs coming out of there were any indication, a boring vapid, shallow, and entitled culture.

After Musk, there is potential where previously there was none.

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

#929

Post by sytelus »

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…

Story I read in one of the tweets from his old friend was that he has surrounded himself with too many yes man who work overtime to boost his ego. I can imagine he casually mentioning idea of buying Twitter and all the yes men praising him for his brilliance. No one did due diligence to figure out that he would need to sell $4B of his TSLA stock just to avoid bankruptcy after spending $44B.
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