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Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

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181–190 of 458 posts

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#181
post #72

Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.

You're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving. Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid. Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee. Fire your IT sta…

Doesn't this assume that you won't eventually just replace some of these people?

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#182
post #62

Did Musk describe 'Breakthrough Twitter 2.0' in a separate message that hasn't been made public? "Stay at Twitter because we're moving to 80 hour work weeks and cancelling Christmas" can't be the argument by itself, right? It's got to be something like "Stay at Twitter because we're building exciting new project X, but we'll need 80 hour work weeks to pull this off..."

He's a techno-feudalist. The lord doesn't need to explain to his serfs why his demands are required.

Elon's previous companies are populated by true believers (albeit because of a shared vision ie: colonizing Mars) who behave more like serfs when pushed. With Twitter, it's like Elon started governing a democracy and didn't realize that almost everyone (except H1B holders) can just leave and do something else.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#183
post #68

It would be interesting to know what portion of Twitter employees are on work visas and can’t easily take the offer to quit. I’d guess an international company like Twitter had several hundred people on H-1B, L1 and similar visas. After these voluntary layoffs it seems like there might be 2,000 employees left, so at least 10% of them would be on work visas by this napkin math.

i won't link to them, but this is public information, at least for the H1-B. you can find the number for a given company and their respective positions.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. Once the dust settles my prediction is productivity will also soar.

Why would this happen? From the outside, it seems like Elon is absolutely decimating employee morale. See for example this thread from an engineer who has no beef with Elon and wants to see Twitter succeed, but still took the severance: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025

Nobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because they would be mobbed

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#185
post #62

Did Musk describe 'Breakthrough Twitter 2.0' in a separate message that hasn't been made public? "Stay at Twitter because we're moving to 80 hour work weeks and cancelling Christmas" can't be the argument by itself, right? It's got to be something like "Stay at Twitter because we're building exciting new project X, but we'll need 80 hour work weeks to pull this off..."

Working for one of Elon Musk's companies sounds brutal, but I can understand the appeal of burning hot and bright on something truly innovative. I would feel proud and motivated to work like crazy on something like Starship, but this is Twitter. I suspect Musk's strategy of appealing to people who want to change the world and be on the bleeding edge of technology won't hold up the same way as it did for his other com…

I suspect Elon wildly overestimates the attraction of working on Twitter.

For Tesla, it was one of a handful of places in the world where you could work on electric cars. SpaceX was one of what -- maybe 3 places in the world? -- where you really could work on rockets. If either of those inspired you, Tesla and SpaceX are premier employers.

If your interests are building large distributed systems, that has lots of choices.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#186
post #72

Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.

I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.

It seems you're in a narrow minority with that opinion, though it's closer than I would've guessed. 65% for No Outages by Dec 15, '22.

https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#188
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Musk played people who quit this week, he used some trigger words in his email to sus out people who are not committed to the company. And the heard mentality kicked in and more people quit.

What does "committed" look like to you? The promise of working more for the same or less? What upside is there for folks who "commit"? Besides personal gratification, is it even remotely likely that Twitter will do something at this point to pull untold riches from thin air that would somehow benefit these people? From the sound of it, no.

The engineers (don't care about non-engineers) who quit need to face the fact that were part of "company" which gave negative returns to both public and private investors for almost a decade.

I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#189
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the opposite, massive growth and improvement in the next 12 months. There will be some hiccups, attacks and slanders pieces in the news. It will become the place where corruption get exposed if the government don’t manage to close it down. Quite a show for sure.

Who is doing the growing when there's no one left to make stuff and/or those that remain don't know how the current stuff works? If he's going to rehire new people, who is going to want to work in an organization where you are deemed essentially the enemy of growth and are easily expendable?

A lot of people are interested in working for him.

Tesla and SpaceX fight for #1 and #2 spot for place to work.

Is changing the auto industry, he is overpassing Nasa with a fraction of the budget. How much proof do you need?

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also imagine job postings. Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are. Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job.…

> it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.

Just one brand name on your resume can entirely change the trajectory of your career compensation. I see so many people working as SWEs at these small businesses or even fortune 500 companies. Sure they make 6 figures usually but their compensation is not in the same stratosphere as even entry level big tech SWE since so much of big tech pay is in equity.
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