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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

#451

Post by covidiot5 »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #434
98codes wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#452

Post by watwut »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #434
98codes wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zero code situation is wishful thinking - poster just made it up.

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

#453

Post by ghaff »

bombcar wrote: post #304
TeMPOraL wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's usually unemployment insurance and it's provided by the state (literally, it'll be the state the employee resides in - here's California's: https://edd.ca.gov ). There ARE "insurance" products that will "defer your credit/mortgage payments in case of a job loss" - they are almost all universally some form of scam (or at least a very bad "insurance").

I think it’s the state of the employer but I’m not sure. After all that’s who is paying into the fund. At least that’s what I remember when I looked into it when I was living in a different state than my employer and things were looking precarious.

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

#454

Post by giantrobot »

brainphreeze wrote: post #372
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…

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not

It's not.

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

#455

Post by phpisthebest »

more_corn wrote: post #259
phpisthebest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Are you disagreeing that layoffs are happening at twitter? Elon told investors it would happen, and he needs to increase profit by $1.5B to stop losing money. Layoffs are guaranteed. The question is will it be 25% as reported or 75% as Elon promised. The answer is we can’t know because nobody knows. It’ll probably something in between.

I am disagreeing that they have happened, or that news sources have any accurate or reportable info on what will happen

They have a bunch of rumors, and panicked employees as "sources" none of which are likely in a position to know anything with any degree of certainty and it is widely irresponsible to report on it as if it was factual

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

#456

Post by shaburn »

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.

Lawsuits are often free financing to fractional future payouts. Especially when the terms are too cush from being clubby. That's like half of Elon's call on this bet.

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

#457

Post by cercatrova »

AlexandrB wrote: post #436
cercatrova wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Sign ups were directly correlated to revenue, at least in my case, and likely most others, such as in @joegahona's comment about publishing. That is to say, the customer satisfaction decrease in popups did not decrease revenue, and that is assuming there even was a satisfaction decrease at all; again, most technical users vastly overestimate how many people actually care about popups, most non-tech people simply click the X to make it go away, and a percentage of all visitors will sign up.

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

#458

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

I don't believe this at all. I think there's different tiers of journalism. One tier is going to publish "anonymous person says X" and that tier will be fast, sensational, and less accurate. Another tier is going to publish experts on the record and that tier is going to be slower, boring, and more accurate.

My perception of recent news tends is that sources that were in the accurate/quality tier are shifting to the fast/anonymous tier. In the short term their reputation plus speed and sensationalism will make them seem like the best of both worlds. In the long run people will just recalibrate their opinions of previously esteemed sources.

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

#459

Post by georgeg23 »

treis wrote: post #404
georgeg23 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The courts can make anything happen .

I wonder how that would work, practically. You'd have to track down every individual shareholder and... what undo the transaction? Seems impractical.

The money hasn't been released to shareholders yet.

Currently the target is Nov 8, but a lot could happen before then.

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

#460

Post by sneak »

falcolas wrote: post #97
sneak wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, there is a fair amount of respect (in business at least) for the idea of “consent to continue the interaction can be revoked with or without cause at any time”. I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal outside the rare edge case where there is only a single employer in a geographical region, and even that unfortunate situation should probably be remediated with a different type of gove…

> 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.

How does Twitter hold any sway whatsoever over their employees' abilities to meet basic human needs, or their access to healthcare? I think for this to hold true, you have to assume that anyone working there must have zero savings, and no other job prospects.
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