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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

#431

Post by Reimersholme »

cercatrova wrote: post #328
simonw wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#432

Post by acdha »

hef19898 wrote: post #338
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only an NDA - many companies also require you to sign anti-disparagement clauses, meaning you can have severance clawed back if you speak negatively of the company.

Something like that would never hold up in court, in fact it might even make the whole firing illegal in the first place. Unless, of course, so NDA's would also prevent the employer from speaking negatively about the employee, but those are extremely rare.

You might be right but a lot of this stuff is based on the calculation that most people do not have the assets to wage a lengthy legal battle when they’re newly unemployed. I’ve heard a lot of stories about wildly illegal things which either went completely unchallenged or became moot because the company went busy with no assets.

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

#433

Post by phpisthebest »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #234
phpisthebest wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you the viral "day in the Life" video that was going around in the last week or so did not help the situation much.

Loathe to give outrage reposters views but here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc The video was posted by a remote financial analyst who was visiting the SF office for the first time. She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time. The perks are nice, maybe too nice you could argue, but the notion that the video proves sh…

This is not the first time a twitter employee has implied a light work schedule. There were posts when the first Elon buyout rumor came around about twitter employee reporting remote work amounting to around 30 hours a week..

This just adds fuel to the fire that for the most part Twitter has a bunch of part time employee getting very high full time wages.

Now there is a large segment of the population that believe 32 hour work weeks should be standard, if your one of those then I suppose their posts will not spark much respond, but for most people that will spark strong negative emotions.

> She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time.

then it should not be labeled as "a day in the life"

Watching the video the person comes away with an impression this is more than just 1 hour of the day. I also suspect you are giving this person far too much credit for the amount of work they did that day. I am guessing it was more like 1 hour of real work, couple hours of meetings, and the rest socializing / using the "amenities"

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

#434

Post by MichaelCollins »

98codes wrote: post #427
MichaelCollins wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many devs at twitter have no code to show for the past month, because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working? I would guess more than a few. Firing those "for cause" will probably be easy; they stopped working for a month and anybody can get fired for that. Those that remained productive will probably have better prospects for keeping their jobs, and for suing if they're fired.

We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now -- why would it start to matter now, particularly for those at more senior levels?

> We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now

You're severely overstating it. The difference between 500 loc and 5000 loc isn't a clear signal of anything. But zero lines of code certainly is. Firing people because the VCS shows they stopped working is common.

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

#435

Post by theGnuMe »

dirheist wrote: post #274
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…

Those being laid off for cause are the 3 senior level executives (the old CEO, the lead counsel, and the content policy head). Those 3 had a 100+ million cumulative severance package which they are now no longer eligible to receive, although none of them are strapped for cash.

It would be funny if the cause was "selling Twitter to Musk". :)

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

#436

Post by AlexandrB »

cercatrova wrote: post #328
simonw wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems shortsighted. It's optimizing for what's easy to measure (sign ups) over what's hard to measure (brand, customer satisfaction, word of mouth).

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

#437

Post by vlz »

phone8675309 wrote: post #396
simonw wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how high quality journalism works. There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet). When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive…

Every reporter I have ever met (and this especially includes those that went to j-school) at this point just regurgitates press releases or is too scared to bite the hand (or the hands of the golfing buddies, or the advertisers) that signs their paychecks.

Mmh, and are these people doing so working for the Washington Post or a similarly renowned journal?

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

#438

Post by freejazz »

hyperpape wrote: post #345
dirheist wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those being laid off for cause are the 3 senior level executives (the old CEO, the lead counsel, and the content policy head). Those 3 had a 100+ million cumulative severance package which they are now no longer eligible to receive, although none of them are strapped for cash.

Matt Levine has a good explanation ( https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-31/elon-m... ), which is that they receive a golden parachute for a simple reason. Their self-interest was to say "la-la-la, we can't hear you" when Musk comes trying to buy Twitter. That would've given them a chance to maintain high paid positions for years. Instead, they sold to him, knowing they'd probably be given the boot. No…

The board decided to sell, not the C-level suite because they do not have that power.

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

#439

Post by klpassv »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #23

It seems that Elon thinks that there are too many managers (per coder) there https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816

10 managers per coder seems a bit extreme. However, 3 managers, 7 "coders" engaging in social justice and one workhorse coder is entirely realistic.

I doubt though that Musk can figure out the actual workhorse in a short time. The posers are very good at self promotion.

Weeding out those who change pronouns in documentation and agitate on Slack would be a reliable start. From there, close reading of PRs, their usefulness and code quality is required. LOC is not an indicator.

As for managers, most of them are useless.

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

habitue wrote: post #230
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money. Of course, this comment is predicated on the assumption that America's loose labour laws are the reason for this salary disparity, and I'm not personally willing to follow you to that conclusion. I think it's far mor…

A tradeoff can exist without implying that the tradeoff is necessary. In other words, America has A but not B, Europe has B but not A, and there doesn't happen to be a place with both A and B, but it's not impossible in principle. Workers would still need to decide if they value A or B more, even if in a perfect world they could have both.

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