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

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

#181

Post by UncleMeat »

gitfan86 wrote: post #80
jdm2212 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For salaried, at-will employment, the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want. There are exceptions for, like, sexual harassment and racial discrimination, but not for "I disagree with the boss about what is a realistic project timeline".

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.

This causes minimal hard to a business and zero harm to Musk's ability to afford yachts. But a very large number of employees have jobs because they need to pay rent and buy food. Losing that job is a significant change to their lives. Software engineers are more likely to have large savings that make it easier for them to say "fuck you" to their boss and leave but in general this system of at will employment is not actually balanced.

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

#182

Post by fzeroracer »

COGlory wrote: post #67
outside1234 wrote: post #20

Honestly, the whole of Twitter should just walk out and wildcat strike until Wednesday morning. The worst he can do is fire you.

Why? What has Musk actually done? To date there's: - Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing. - Reports that he gave a te…

> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription

> None of these things are particularly unreasonable

I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?

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

#183

Post by duxup »

AlexandrB wrote: post #164
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.

I'm constantly shocked that "leveraged buyouts" are a thing. It seems like taking a business and loading it up with debt is a recipe for failure that would introduce a lot of risk for the lender, but banks and other capital holders continue issuing the debt.

Yeah the idea that Twitter is now worth more with substantially more debt doesn’t make sense to me.

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

#184

Post by joegahona »

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.

Sacks knows his stuff. Calacanis is more of a henchman and acknowledged begrudgingly on the All-In Podcast that he's incapable of coding.

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

#185

Post by rglover »

UncleMeat wrote: post #180
rglover wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pitfalls of extreme comfort. You have a place like the Bay Area with near perfect weather, obscene amounts of money, and at least until relatively recently, a social environment that lorded you as a "rockstar." You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!" Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explo…

It isn't an entitled attitude to refuse to work over the weekend under threat of losing your job to ship a new feature that isn't actually urgent at the whims of your new CEO who has spent the last few months publicly shitting all over you.

You're correct. I think that behavior is just the flip side of what I described above (instead of entitlement in favor of comfort, entitlement in favor of abusive behavior being shrugged off as "genius at work").

Both behaviors are ignorant and exist in an altered state of reality that's long-term destructive.

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

#186

Post by COGlory »

fzeroracer wrote: post #182
COGlory wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What has Musk actually done? To date there's: - Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing. - Reports that he gave a te…

> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription > None of these things are particularly unreasonable I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?

The feature was in development for far longer. The real question is, will it exist on Nov. 7th?

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

#187

Post by cragfar »

duxup wrote: post #177
dmix wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be arbitrary and pure speculation but with ~7500 employees (3000 of which are engineers) I think they'll be able to do just fine with 5000. -25% of staff would just mean going back to 2019 staff levels... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit... I remember it was a common meme on HN to ask what Twitter's thousands of employees did all day, even back in 2015. So maybe I'm falling into t…

Keep in mind that’s cash flow, not profit and they need to at least maintain it while cutting staff… and maybe make a profit one day? They only have made a profit 2 out of the last 10 years.

for 2021, 1.2 billion was spent on R&D, 1.7 billion on cost of revenue (guessing a decent amount of this was salaries), and 765 million was due to a class action lawsuit they lost. With all of these, they showed a loss of 200 million. There definitely appears to be some fat that can be trimmed.

This year is on track for a gain, but they sold some ad service for a billion which distorts things.

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

#188

Post by quintu5 »

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?

This is why I never touch new reddit or visit the site on mobile. It's old reddit + ublock origin on desktop and a third-party app on mobile every time.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

xnorswap wrote: post #103
jdm2212 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For salaried, at-will employment, the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want. There are exceptions for, like, sexual harassment and racial discrimination, but not for "I disagree with the boss about what is a realistic project timeline".

> 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.

[deleted]
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