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

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341–350 of 458 posts

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

#341
post #72

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

There are many people who could lose half their bodyweight and end up even healthier than they were before. But they won't get there by doing it with an axe.

Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.

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

#342
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They don't have stock? Twitter is a private company now. Not sure if you missed the news that this guy named Elon Musk bought the whole company. > 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. I think the issue most people are taking with this is that…

Private companies still have stock and it tends to be a big part of their compensation.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean there is no stock. The stock isn't publicly traded, which makes it harder to sell, but Twitter has a bunch of shareholders (Saudi Prince and Jack Dorsey are known ones) and could give out shares to employees.

Having illiquid shares in a company that has already gone through most of its growth is completely unappealing. What is the value prop for a talented, high productivity employee to work at Twitter? The management hates its employees, seemingly hated the product, and doesn't even understand the business that he bought. What's the upside for employees? There's a reason people were hanging up exactly at 5pm as Musk was…

>Having illiquid shares in a company that has already gone through most of its growth is completely unappealing.

There are lots of reason to own stock besides speculative growth. Taking part of profit as dividend is the most obvious reason.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of double time (hence talking about effective comp), I didn't see mentions of salary being cut but mayhaps I just missed it?

I think the salary hasn’t been cut, but the value of the stock (options) are probably very different now

As I understand it, nobody holds stock anymore, because he took the company private. He bought everybody's shares. So whatever portion of employee's comp was equity, that's now zero. Elsewhere, I saw somebody estimate that to be around half of twitter employees' comp -- I have zero confidence in that estimate, but it doesn't sound unreasonable.

And while they might get a lump sum for whatever equity they held, that's money in the bank and no longer a carrot.

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

#345
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is collapsing so quickly and in such spectacular fashion that it would probably be better to have some sort of permathread that consolidates the latest updates on Twitter. At the rate it's going, Twitter may be spared all of the lawsuits coming its way simply by virtue of not existing by the time the lawsuits can come to fruition.

Website and app working fine for me. Don't really see this "spectacular collapse" everyone seems to wish would happen

Yes, but as has been brought up multiple times, for how long? Are those that remain the right people to fix hardware or software failures, which are inevitable?

I put in the request to download my data last night -- not because I'm leaving Twitter, but just as a precaution -- and I wonder if it will be fulfilled. I'm sure it's an automated process, but will the systems be running by the time it gets to my request?

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of double time (hence talking about effective comp), I didn't see mentions of salary being cut but mayhaps I just missed it?

Stock, "$400" lunches, remote option, etc. Everything that's not a paycheck seems slashed.

Good point, that's definitely a part of comp'.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Tesla has to work for the driver, passengers, the others on the road, pedestrians, the road itself - these are new problems never encountered before that Elon is tackling head-on. If you consider every person on the world to be connected (if they are physically touching the ground), a Tesla has to literally work for those billions of people.

A Tesla in Los Angeles does not have to work for a pedestrian in New York.

But it has to be engineered to do so.

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Tesla has to work for the driver, passengers, the others on the road, pedestrians, the road itself - these are new problems never encountered before that Elon is tackling head-on. If you consider every person on the world to be connected (if they are physically touching the ground), a Tesla has to literally work for those billions of people.

A Tesla in Los Angeles does not have to work for a pedestrian in New York.

If the Tesla in LA works fine and runs perfectly, the market will coalesce around that fact and accept it as a major player on the road, giving the pedestrian the necessary confidence they need to be safe around a Tesla.

Again, these are brand new problems that Elon is solving, so they may be hard to parse due to how forward-looking he is.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess, though I don't know for sure, that having your hero buy your company and then fire a bunch of your friends and valued colleagues seemingly arbitrarily, including entire teams that exist for actual reasons, probably would dampen your opinion of him somewhat. Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought…

> if [Steve Jobs] came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO? "Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products." "His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees" "Jobs managed to force…

He did do the firing whole teams bit, but not the fucking up the product bit.

I assume, for example that Apple didn't need as many finance people after the cuts, but he didn't manage to make the whole department quit in disgust.

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

#350
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 wanted to add payments and digital identity and whatnot to the mobile app. Maybe cool if adoption is universal for some reason. Not exactly revolutionizing energy and transportation or colonizing Mars.
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