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

washingtonpost.com

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

#321

Post by chasd00 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #66
swozey wrote: post #9

Evidently Musk had Tweeps work all weekend on the new Verified feature lest they get fired, and some were fired "for cause" anyway. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1587029446061686784

I'm all for the European don't work unpaid overtime, but what I don't get is the sense of entitlement these people had, when they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind. "WE WILL SHOW YOU ELON" - Show what exactly? That billing and other completely standard cookiecutter SaaS features can't be implemented by other e…

> they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs

it's the epitome of Twitter, overflowing with righteous indignation online but won't get off their ass to do anything IRL.

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

#322

Post by zimpenfish »

greenie_beans wrote: post #87
skhr0680 wrote: post #21

Twitter is already improved IMHO: The "sign in or sign up" nag screen is gone for me!

it's gotten worse for me. i can't access it. in a browser that's always logged in, i try to visit any page on the site and get a page that says "Something went wrong, but don't fret — let's give it another shot." the site works whenever i login via a fresh, private browser session. for a minute i thought i was blocked after muting the words "elon" and "musk"

I had that yesterday in Safari - clearing all the caches and closing every Twitter tab (I somehow had 5 open) meant that it worked when I opened a new one. Maybe something Service Worker-y? Have had that issue with the Twitter before.

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

#324

Post by shwoopdiwoop »

simonw wrote: post #315
drstewart wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/30/23430008/elon-musk-twitt... >He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,

Interesting commentary on this from someone who used to work at Twitter: - https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/1586812933043933184 > Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first

If it has no effect on metrics but removes as major annoyance for users, why would you not have done that in the first place?

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

#325

Post by hef19898 »

linuxhansl wrote: post #276
saurik wrote: post #253

6 months ago it was all painted (maybe seemingly, though, by prior executives who weren't speaking for Musk) as if this wouldn't be a big deal for employees, which to me makes this idea that people are being rapidly fired "for cause" after a suddenly-imposed weekend work shift deadline extra shitty :/. (Even if I do sometimes claim that Twitter is incompetent as an organization or bloated with idle staff, these are h…

Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me, and would open up Twitter for a barrage of lawsuits - and rightly so. Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. I'm certainly curious where this all is going.

Stories like this make like the employee protection I enjoy even more.

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

#326

Post by bombcar »

jupp0r wrote: post #201
jupp0r wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the definition of corruption?

Not sure why this gets downvoted. IANAL but it every compliance training I've ever done, basing company business decisions on being invited to fancy dinners raises all sorts of red flag when it comes to compliance with anti corruption laws.

You don't base your decisions on fancy dinners, but you do get invited to fancy dinners! It's all part of the game and those who know how to play it play it well.

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

#327

Post by spamizbad »

Interesting that David Sacks and Jason Calacanis are "Staff software engineers" - assuming that's accurate. To my knowledge, neither have worked as professional software engineers. Calacanis is a journalist turned entrepreneur/investor and Sacks is a former management consultant who became a C-suite during the dotcom boom who later became an entrepreneur/investor.

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

#328

Post by cercatrova »

simonw wrote: post #315
drstewart wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/30/23430008/elon-musk-twitt... >He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,

Interesting commentary on this from someone who used to work at Twitter: - https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/1586812933043933184 > Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first

Technical people, especially engineers and those on HN, hate sign up forms but having grown a product to X thousand users, the more you push the sign up form, the more people sign up. You can even plot a linear relationship between the two, which I've done before.

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

#329

Post by delecti »

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?

Non-technical non-users are not dissuaded, they sign up. Technical non-users using adblock aren't profitable conversions anyway, so "who cares?" is an entirely reasonable decision for the PO/PM who made it.

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

#330

Post by mapme »

novaRom wrote: post #16

> a quarter of the staff totaling more than 7,000 > After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000 that should reduce operating expenses significantly, several hundreds of millions dollars?

Employee salaries is only 1.5B of their 4.5B annual costs.

Edit: per Wapo but you can see the cost structure from 10ks mostly

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