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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

#441

Post by dev_daftly »

lm28469 wrote: post #99
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 Six business days to come up with a system to process $6m per month of income. Nothing unreasonable indeed...

They already have the payment system in place. This is just adding verification as a feature to the already existing subscription service.

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

#442

Post by drowning-secs »

vxNsr wrote: post #383
drowning-secs wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need to give two months notice, or compensate for two months time, if you're going to have a big layoff. Laying off 50% of employees is also going to add up. 3,500 employees * $20,000 = $70,000,000.

If they keep them on they'll need to pay that anyway, this way they start saving money in 2 months instead of never.

I was comparing doing a “layoff” vs. firing “for cause”.

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

#443

Post by marak830 »

simonw wrote: post #305
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

> Another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters last week said the total number of layoffs is likely to be closer to 50 percent. Unless I’m missing something, the only sources for this article are a mix of speculation and anonymous sources who can’t even agree with each other about the layoff.

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…

On the flip side, I believe everyone understands what you wrote. But it requires faith that the author and editors are writing in good faith, which has been decreasing for a long time.

Click bait headlines, stories with weak fact checking or even printing outright lies has decreased (at least my) trust in news articles and has resulted in me questioning facts and anonymous quotes more frequently(which may be a good thing).

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

#444

Post by phpisthebest »

snotrockets wrote: post #346
phpisthebest wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry but i am over the "people familiar" .. " condition of anonymity" crap in news Either put a name to it, or dont report on it

Asking sources to publish their name is a very sure way to not have sources at all. Quote Orwell, Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. You need to get people to tell you about all those things, and as that someone who dislike them being printed has power (it ain't news otherwise,) you need to find a way to make people talk to you. "Help me to rekt your career and life" just don't cut it.

I understand that, and maybe the activists pretending to be journalists should have thought about that before burning the public's trust by just taking any sensationalized "source" with no vetting and reporting on it as fact.

The "media" did this to themselves, now at this point no one would trust any news story that is only validated with "anonymous sources" as the media has proven they are either incapable of vetting these sources for truthful info, or do not actually have any sources at all and are just making shit up for the clicks

Either way they have given the public no reason to trust them at this point

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

#445

Post by BaseballPhysics »

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.

Fair enough. I took the parent comment to be implying that that tradeoff was necessary--i.e. to have high salaries you have to have loose labour laws--as opposed to a simple statement about the current world we live in.

If it's the latter, absolutely you are right, and it is certainly the case that tech employees today are forced to make the choice between New York/California tech salaries and strong labour laws, regardless of whether or not there's a necessary inverse relationship between those two things.

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

#446

Post by throwaway1851 »

nemo44x wrote: post #38
yboris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it legal to demand people work on weekends? How is it legal to (even threaten) firing if a new assigned task that takes a long time is not done on time?

They are all exempt employees so they aren't covered by a lot of labor law, such as getting paid "overtime", etc. This is how professional, salaried employment works. Exempt employees tend to be paid very well and have great benefits though. You can fire an employee for no reason at all since employment is "at will". Musk probably assumes a good deal of the workforce is lazy and/or incompetent and he doesn't want to…

If the terminations are happening for the purpose of depriving employees of stock-related compensation they are about to earn, that may be an illegal reason. For example, you cannot let a salesperson snag a huge deal and then fire him or her to avoid paying the commission - it’s not an “at will” issue.

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

#447

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

DesiLurker wrote: post #332
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Elon already tweeted that this is false. 2. As another commenter mentioned, I don't even think this would be possible given California WARN Act requirements, but I'm less sure on the legal requirements here.

>Elon already tweeted that this is false. Did you expect him to say it is true?

Of course not, I would expect him to say nothing in that case.

Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous how people conflate "Elon is a bad guy who stretches the truth all the time" with him sending out a completely unambiguous statement that, if it were a lie, would easily be proven wrong in one day. Point being, people who do stretch the truth/over-promise know how to do it in a way that isn't falsifiable in 24 hours.

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

#448

Post by ghaff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #258
josho wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example to further illustrate your point, it is possible for a business to purchase key employee insurance. As an employee we do not have the same privilege.

It's just a nitpick and it doesn't impact GP's point all that much, but: surely employees in the US have some sort of job loss insurance - if not standalone, then attached to a mortgage or life insurance?

Not really. There’s unemployment insurance. But in NH for example to pick one state I’m familiar with, the maximum is $427 per week for 26 weeks. Some other states are certainly more but for someone in a high paying job it’s not much. So a max of about $11,000. I’m familiar with other insurance other than your own savings.

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

#449

Post by watwut »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #389
linuxhansl wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The number of such people will be miniscule.

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

#450

Post by criddell »

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?

When a sign-in-to-see-the-thing-you-just-searched-for shows up, I take it as a sign that the company isn't doing very well. If you've ran out of good ideas for driving growth, you start considering the bad ideas.
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