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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

#531

Post by bombcar »

mrguyorama wrote: post #486
bombcar wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen signs for commercial truck drivers around town in front windows, starting $80k and "local deliveries only". For certain types of jobs it's still the most effective method out there.

There's no law that says the number they give on the sign is the exact number you get on your offer letter and not some "work for us for X amount of time and get Y amount of pay increase over that time" that may (or may not) eventually reach 80k

That's all true, but around here they're getting damn desperate.

Not saying it's worth doing, or a good job, but they're out there, especially in the smaller towns.

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

#532

Post by nemo44x »

throwaway1851 wrote: post #446
nemo44x wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RSUs only vest if you are an employee the day they vest. If a salesperson wins a deal and you fire them before paying their commission that’s different since they closed the deal first.

It’s very common for companies to let individuals go before bonuses vest.

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

#533

Post by tommica »

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.

I do like the change, i can't even sign up with my email to twitter - most likely because it is a custom domain.

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

#534

Post by prepend »

pfisherman wrote: post #507
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.

The true big brain 10x programmer is pushing -100 lines of code per sprint.

I sort of think of the absolute value of lines changed as a pulse.

You can do -100. You can do 100. You can net zero from 100 adds and 100 subtracts (abs=200). But it’s something. If you have long stretches of zero that’s not good.

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

#535

Post by adolph »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #524
Archelaos wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and codetermination. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

I read this as "code termination" instead of "co determination" and was about halfway through the wikipedia article and quite confused before I figured it out.

Yeah, its what happens when you get fired but everyone wraps their arms around you in a big group hug so security can't get to you: de-termination.

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

#536

Post by jerkstate »

roughly wrote: post #510
khazhoux wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are correct that LOC is not a full measure of productivity, and there are many factors to consider, it would be nonsense to say that merging code has no bearing on productivity. All things equal (and disregarding engineers whose job isn’t coding per se), submitted code is the essential deliverable of a software engineer.

No, “solved problems” is the essential deliverable of a software engineer, and the more senior one gets the less often “submitting code” is the correct path to solving a problem. Someone might submit code based on your work, but there’s no direct correlation between “submitted code” and “did your job” at higher levels.

sometimes the most senior engineers don't ship a ton of code to prod, but they should certainly be writing code to figure out where the organization should go, justify the ROI of their ideas, demonstrate a large-scale problem that needs resources mustered, interrogate business logic databases to tie disparate ideas together, understanding the scale and frequency of large scale problems, and so on. If you're a senior engineer and can't point to any code you've written in the past 3 months, maybe you're not really an engineer, because you're not using engineering to solve problems.

I think a lot of software engineers get too comfortable with the idea that meetings are deliverables - they aren't; meetings are coordination and planning. if nobody completes the work that was coordinated and planned, the meeting was nothing but a waste of time. Depending on your seniority as an engineer, you may have written code to decide that the work should be done, or you may be tasked with writing code to carry out the plan. If you're an engineer and you're not writing code on either side of meetings, you should dig deep and figure out why.

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

#537

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> constantly shocked that "leveraged buyouts" are a thing

LBOs were a cure to the poison of the post-war conglomerate [1]. Those were run as personal fiefdoms by aloof executives and their cronies.

The traditional check was M&A. Conglomerates having no clean competitors, this–in practice–meant a buyer putting up cash and borrowing the rest, buying the company, taking out a loan in the company's name, using that to pay themselves and then paying back the personal loan. The only purpose the buyer's credit served was to gatekeep. LBOs compress that process, letting anyone challenge management if they can convince investors/lenders to back their vision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conglomerate_(company)

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

#538

Post by ok_dad »

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?

Even fucking Google keeps putting a half-page pop-up on my iPhone saying "WANT TO SIGN IN, OR JUST KEEP SEARCHING 'ANONYMOUSLY' LIKE A CHUMP?" or something just as fucking annoying.

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

#539

Post by prepend »

thinkindie wrote: post #519
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.

is code the only output of an engineer? not everything is committed in a VCS: you have documentation, architecture, RFC etc etc depending on the size of the company and seniority of the employee.

That stuff is typically in a VCS.

I don’t think it’s an absolute rule that no commits means someone isn’t developing. But it’s probably a reason to have a conversation.

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

#540

Post by memish »

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.

> Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point.

It wouldn't because we're in a downturn and Twitter was already planning layoffs.

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