Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 852 posts

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#141

Post by falcolas »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #114
falcolas wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no? No. Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads. At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.

I see a ton of signs saying help wanted in frot of businesses.

Anecdotally, any business with a sign in their front window is not a business which can replace a full time job, let alone employment by Twitter.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#142

Post by georgeg23 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #105
Alex3917 wrote: post #25

> Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were "staff software engineer." Do either of these guys even know how to program? Calacanis has been making tech content for decades, and I've never once heard him talk about writing code.

Twitter probably didn't have a pre-existing title for "Member of the Musk Entourage" so they just found what they considered the next closest thing.

Musk thinks everything is software engineering, including the universe.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#143

Post by yamtaddle »

phpisthebest wrote: post #122
rakoo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal There is a big one: the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship, the employer clearly has more power over where things go. So it's absolutely normal to protect the employee from being asked too much, especially when said employee doesn't benefit from the overtime. There is a big bias towards taking companies as important citizens whose needs mus…

> the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship Sure it is, they want my labor, I want to sell my labor. We agree on a price. If my price changes, or they are unwilling to buy it any more I find a new person to buy my labor. I was looking for a job when I found this one, and I will be looking again when I find my next one.

It's typically held that the average employer being able to go without a worker in a given position much longer than the average worker can go without a job is what makes it uneven. Saying "no" is far riskier to one side than the other. There also tend to be large information imbalances, in practice.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#144

Post by georgeg23 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #137
georgeg23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems he barged in, went through internal chats to look for evidence to scuttle the deal or change the terms. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15868858873416458...

Would anything let him change the deal at this point? Even if Twitter was hiding their bot problem Elon's initial offer waived his ability to do due diligence on this, no?

The courts can make anything happen .

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#145

Post by xnorswap »

bpodgursky wrote: post #125
xnorswap wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want In the US. I'm glad I work in a country where workers actually have rights.

You probably don't work in a country with a 3.5% unemployment rate.

Actually I do, precisely 3.5% in fact:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#146

Post by gitfan86 »

robin_reala wrote: post #132
gitfan86 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing is that this goes both ways. If you are an at-will employee you can send an email that says "I resign effective immediately" and walk away and never speak to anyone at that company ever again.

Who’s hurt more: the company whose employee leaves on the spot, or the employee whose company fires them on the spot? At-will is asymmetric.

It is the definition of symmetrical. Both parties can cut ties at any time without any warning.

In general employers are able to benefit from this symmetrical relationship more often though since they are only losing a small percentage of their workers while the employee is losing 100% of the income they were getting from that employeer.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#147

Post by dmix »

anamexis wrote: post #92
wisnoskij wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes from the news stations who said days ago that people were already laid off, and their sources turned out to be random people they found on the street with meme fake names. https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/10/28/2339204/pranksters-...

No, it doesn't, this comes from the Washington Post, speaking to people familiar with the layoff planning.

Given everything over the last decade, people should not trust anything when it involves a) highly controversial/partisan/breathless news and b) dealing in anonymous sources and rumors.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#148

Post by s1artibartfast »

falcolas wrote: post #141
s1artibartfast wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a ton of signs saying help wanted in frot of businesses.

Anecdotally, any business with a sign in their front window is not a business which can replace a full time job, let alone employment by Twitter.

There are full time jobs, but I agree that they likely won't match a Twitter salary.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#149

Post by giarc »

duxup wrote: post #19

Twitter now owes about $1 billlion in debit payments per year. Cash flow last year $630 million. I think 25% staff reductions is just a starting point.

$1 billion across 5000 employees is just $200,000 each. I suspect if you add total comp plus expenses for each employee you get to $200,000 pretty quickly.

Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

#150

Post by AlexandrB »

dmix wrote: post #129
drexlspivey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god, I stopped clicking twitter links due to this crap

Reddit and Instagram is even worse. Besides cookie boxes (which all have different UIs and rarely a good no button) it's probably the most annoying thing on an ad-blocked internet. How do the designers who work at these tech companies not understand that repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up? Nor incentivize others to link to it?

I think these things come about because of A/B testing. The metric being optimized is probably "app installs" or "account creations" and the negative side effects of driving a bunch of users off are not considered/measured.
Post reply on HN