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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

#491

Post by [deleted] »

twawaaay wrote: post #362
H8crilA wrote: post #339

So, it was a simple corporate raid after all. Welcome back to the 70s: energy markets problems, inflation, and now finally some good old corporate raiding with LBOs. PS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raid

Twitter has been taken private so this is not corporate raid. Corporate raid is aimed at making changes to the company specifically to increase share price. The idea is that the resulting share price increase covers at least significant part of the cost of getting majority stake. This makes the buyout relatively cheap or even free. Which of course makes little sense if you are also taking the company private. I would…

[deleted]

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

#492

Post by watwut »

phpisthebest wrote: post #433
tomjakubowski wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Meh, this is just looking for outrage. And quite literally.

Also, if you are going to the office after being remote, meetings and discussions tend are always the point. Otherwise you could have stayed at home.

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

#493

Post by bcbrown »

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.

I'm guessing you hear a lot more about the failures/impending failures in LBO financing than you do the successes/non-defaults. You could calculate the implied probability of default from the POV of the lender by comparing the financing terms to "assumed risk free" treasuries, and then compare that with the historical data to see how accurate they are at pricing that risk. If you'd rather not do that work, I'm sure there's plenty of papers in the academic literature examining that exact question.

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

#494

Post by pc86 »

chris11 wrote: post #309
pc86 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called a layoff.

Layoffs can be more expensive than terminating for cause. https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-sued-by-former-employ...

Sorry what does that have to do with the thread?

Tweeps are being told these are performance-related terminations, not layoffs. It was posited that "performance" was referring to Twitter, not the employee. I simply pointed out that's exactly what a layoff was, and performance in this context can only mean the employee, not the company.

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

#495

Post by iav »

freejazz wrote: post #438
hyperpape wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The C suite has an incredible amount of influence to block a deal with a non-strategic acquirer like Elon. The threat of all executives resigning en masse can knee cap a business.

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

#497

Post by watwut »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #212
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #23

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

At least in a dev situation I think 10-1 devs-to-managers is actually a pretty sizable ratio - I think ideally it's more of a 6-to-8ish to one. Now, this of course assumes that engineering managers are not solely doing employee management but also are serving some "tech lead" type roles. I.e. even if an engineering manager isn't coding I think it's essential that (a) a considerable portion of their time is spent doin…

Person who is not coding should not do code reviews.

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

#498

Post by freejazz »

iav wrote: post #495
freejazz wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The C suite has an incredible amount of influence to block a deal with a non-strategic acquirer like Elon. The threat of all executives resigning en masse can knee cap a business.

That's true, but it wasn't the question.

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

#499

Post by jdlshore »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #462
mikeyouse wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saw a note today they're going to layoff a number of "highly compensated" sales people highlighting that they made even more than very senior engineers... which is an interesting plan for a company trying to salvage revenue.

Twitter has salespeople? Like what do they sale? I'm not trying to be facetious I am just ignorant.

They sell ads, so the high-end salespeople were probably in relationships with big enterprise ad purchasing departments.

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

#500

Post by polynomial »

watwut wrote: post #452
MichaelCollins wrote: post #434

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 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.

Perhaps an awful lot of people were just working on a stealth no code project.
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