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

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221–230 of 458 posts

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

#222
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…

He fired badge security, deactivated all badges & then asked that guy to come back just so workers could get out of the parking garage which required a badge to do so. You can see the tweet about it. It happened YESTERDAY.

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

#223

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.

I think there's actually some risk of too much time at Elon twitter making your resume toxic. It's no secret what kind of environment he's fostering there, and many companies simply don't want to hire the type of person who thrives in that situation, regardless of how technically skilled they are.

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

#224
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are runnin…

Elon said "At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense."

But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.

> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there

This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.

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

#225
post #13

At this point, I'm kinda wondering if Musk's deal to finance the Twitter acquisition included some Brewster's Millions -style clause where he gets to keep the company and the $44B if the company goes bankrupt within 90 days.

I had a similar thought - perhaps Elon was visited by a time traveler from the future who convinced him that the only way to stave off some impending disaster is for someone to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as quickly as possible, and he heroically offered to ruin his fortune and reputation to save humanity. That's a stupid idea, but it would elegantly explain his recent behavior...

Honestly, I think you could convince a non-trivial portion of the US population that this is completely true.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're willing to accept a company that is not growing in revenue due to new value created, you can build a system entirely dedicated to maintenance of existing features with a small group. In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?

Imagine going to jail because someone uploaded a file to your computer

Which, by the way, is exactly what "Section 230" prevents.

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

#227
post #135
post #109

In my opinion Elon miscalculated the type of people at Twitter. These aren’t people like the ones in Tesla or SpaceX where there is some sort of idealization of Elon. The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low. None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him. On top of that,…

Engineers interested in cars or rockets have way fewer exciting options than web devs working at Twitter.

While true, engineers ae SpaceX are much much harder to replace that web devs/engineers at Twitter, which are a dime a dozen. With so many in the Valley cutting jobs, if Twitter needs to hire new engineers, I don't think they'll have issues finding them.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?

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

#229
post #109

In my opinion Elon miscalculated the type of people at Twitter. These aren’t people like the ones in Tesla or SpaceX where there is some sort of idealization of Elon. The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low. None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him. On top of that,…

An other component is that if you're working on rockets or EVs you might consider that rewarding in and of itself, and accept lower comp or worse conditions. Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac. And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is…

"halve your effective comp"

And also work double time for the indefinite future. So effective comp is quartered, by my accounting.

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

#230
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80hr+ in-office work weeks with no equity and the threat of being instantly fired for appearing disloyal in Slack or correcting the CEO... sounds fun!

They don't have stock? Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.

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