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100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

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Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#111

Post by Pengy7 »

Demotioo wrote: post #108
P_I_Staker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I wonder if they could band together and challenge this in court. While companies get tons of leeway, you might be surprised that there's sometimes protection. Even if legal, what Musk is doing is incredibly sleazy. The employees agreed to work on certain terms. Then he demands they agree to different terms. Seems sketchy, but I think I know what they'd argue. It's just a really creepy thing. I don't th…

It's the USA why wouldn't he be able to just fire people? He gives them 3 month should be plenty enough

I think contracts aren't enforceable unless both sides get something.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#112

Post by mikkergp »

phphphphp wrote: post #32
mikkergp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/15933997046366... !!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers," "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.” Could be fake, but assuming true, can Elon take it back? Is a webform like legally binding for seve…

10% of Twitter’s engineers is much closer to 150 than 700. The majority of twitters employees were not engineers.

I was assuming the 90% laid off a disproportionate number of non engineers and only engineers were left but your version is much spicier :-)

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#113

Post by justin66 »

gretch wrote: post #93
justin66 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others" (odd framing) is why there is widespread, bipartisan political support for supporting Ukraine with munitions and money. People wouldn't make that choice if they did not know what is going on.

I don’t think that’s true at all? Support was setup and had been streaming into to Ukraine for a long time before any confirmation of a war, much less images. I remember when trump was president and there was the dispute where he was holding back the regular defense aid that the US sends to Ukraine. The point being that hundreds of millions were approved and sent with 0 tweets about the war (literally didn’t happen y…

Perhaps you’re unaware that the level of funding, the level of awareness of what’s happening in Ukraine, the situation itself in Ukraine, have all changed since, you know, the invasion began.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#114

Post by ruh-roh »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #39
partiallypro wrote: post #12

I think there are going to be two levels of shock: 1) Never give people an ultimatum. It basically never works in your favor. That was such a dumb thing by Elon and his team. I don't think Elon expected the numbers to be so high. 2) Workers often overestimate their own worth within a company or how easily they can be replaced. It's likely that all the people leaving saying Twitter is going to majorly break soon won't…

I don't think anything like this has ever happened before to a system with this scale, so who can say? But just as an engineer at another company that probably has a vaguely similar architecture it's certainly in a place of extreme risk. It just depends on if they can get people in place to hold together the critical services. Also things are much more likely to break it they start trying to change things, it will ta…

The "once they start trying to change things" aspect is where I'm most keen to watch.

Surely we have all been involved with large-to-small systems where we were curious how well/long they would stand up on their own without intervention. It's kind of fascinating to watch a real-world example, even though we likely won't get a lot of detail. But still, :popcorn_emoji:.

But what's getting somewhat-ignored in this discourse is they aren't changing anything. All deploys are frozen. And the new CEO has made a ton of promises about new features and policies. Eventually they need to roll those out, and once they do, damn... Even if they have strong automated tests, those generally only tell you that new code is functionally ok. Anything that crosses interfaces, deals with end-to-end integration, or adds new tables/dbs/jobs/etc that would eventually hit their scaling solutions - all could have catastrophic effects.

(And that ignores the consent decree stuff on changes too.)

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#115

Post by prirun »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #103
labrador wrote: post #4

Kylie Robison (Tech reporter for @FortuneMagazine): What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email. https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280

To be honest, I wonder if they could band together and challenge this in court. While companies get tons of leeway, you might be surprised that there's sometimes protection. Even if legal, what Musk is doing is incredibly sleazy. The employees agreed to work on certain terms. Then he demands they agree to different terms. Seems sketchy, but I think I know what they'd argue. It's just a really creepy thing. I don't th…

The main issue to me is that according to what I've read, employees were not given severance agreements nor employment contracts to review before making their decision to stay or go. It's unreasonable to force someone to make an important decision like this without even knowing what they are agreeing to.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#116

Post by seunosewa »

Pengy7 wrote: post #111
Demotioo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the USA why wouldn't he be able to just fire people? He gives them 3 month should be plenty enough

I think contracts aren't enforceable unless both sides get something.

3 months pay sounds like something.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#117

Post by voakbasda »

shagie wrote: post #82
gretch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is losing information on the war really a bad thing? I mean of course it is for people living in Ukraine who need updated information to survive. (But I would also hope they have govt sponsored alternatives) But I actually thought it was deeply disturbing how many ppl in unrelated places, like California, would wake up and look forward to getting a fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others. Ppl were spectating and…

> Is losing information on the war really a bad thing? From the other day: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters... But then we get to other issues such as 'Lost memories': War crimes evidence threatened by AI moderation - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights... And further back: Youtube and Facebook are Removing Evidence of Atrocities, Jeopardizing Cases Against War Cri…

Seems like these companies should be charged with aiding and abetting those war criminals, since they are actively destroying evidence of their crimes.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#119

Post by everforward »

fasthands9 wrote: post #22
toss1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That brings it down to under 1000 employees So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee For contrast, Netflix has the highest revenue per employee at $2.63 million/person, and Apple is second at $2.38 million, and Alphabet & Meta next at $1.64, and eBay at $0.9 million per employee. So, he'll need to get 200x the profitabili…

It seems like ad spending is only going to get more difficult since there are way more options, spending is down in general, and Twitter is not video centric. That being said if you think those things are true then the absolute right move is to scale back operations and stop trying to be a growth innovator - and instead just be a really great forum. Reddit has 700 employees. Twitter can probably survive with 1000. It…

I can't find an exact breakdown, but the sources I can find say that ads are still a majority of Reddit's revenue.

Reddit also has some structural advantages. Building around communities allows Reddit to ban advertiser unfriendly communities, and to threaten to ban others to force them to toe the line. It also gives them rough controls over what other users see (e.g. hiding NSFW content, quarantining subreddits so they don't show up on the not-logged-in front page).

They've also managed to convince their users to moderate each other for free, which gives them a really lean head count.

I think Twitter would need to substantially redefine their product to compete in that arena.

Reddit also only made ~$350M in revenue last year. I don't think competing with Reddit is likely to justify the purchase price of Twitter over the timespan either is likely to survive.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#120

Post by P_I_Staker »

Demotioo wrote: post #108
P_I_Staker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I wonder if they could band together and challenge this in court. While companies get tons of leeway, you might be surprised that there's sometimes protection. Even if legal, what Musk is doing is incredibly sleazy. The employees agreed to work on certain terms. Then he demands they agree to different terms. Seems sketchy, but I think I know what they'd argue. It's just a really creepy thing. I don't th…

It's the USA why wouldn't he be able to just fire people? He gives them 3 month should be plenty enough

You might be surprised. It's really complicated. Based on my experience with companies such as twitter, they are so finicky about not doing stuff like this.

It's not just altruism or for employee moral. It's clear some of the companies are simply deciding to not rock the boat by firing people. This can be more legally complicated than it seems.

Anyway, I'm not really saying one way or another, but it seems to follow that if others are taking measures, there might be good reasons for them. I would be surprised if the Elon / twitter don't get sued by this; multiple times.

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