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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

#61

Post by sneak »

yboris wrote: post #17
swozey wrote: post #9

Evidently Musk had Tweeps work all weekend on the new Verified feature lest they get fired, and some were fired "for cause" anyway. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1587029446061686784

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?

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 government intervention.

Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?

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

#62

Post by makestuff »

jdm2212 wrote: post #22
novaRom wrote: post #16

> a quarter of the staff totaling more than 7,000 > After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000 that should reduce operating expenses significantly, several hundreds of millions dollars?

Unless the sales people are bringing in more than that in sales.

I have a friend who works in sales at a tech company and since all of this accounts are long term customers he really doesn't do much. They like the service so it is basically an auto-renewal. So I guess Elon thinks that advertisers will just auto renew because they like the ROI they get from their spend on twitter. However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by dave78 »

skhr0680 wrote: post #21

Twitter is already improved IMHO: The "sign in or sign up" nag screen is gone for me!

I looked at Musk's feed and it did not appear, but just now clicked on one of the other Twitter links in this thread and got hit with it almost immediately. Maybe the change is still being rolled out? Maybe it was just a fluke? Maybe it doesn't appear on certain people's feeds for one reason or another?

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

#66

Post by rjzzleep »

swozey wrote: post #9

Evidently Musk had Tweeps work all weekend on the new Verified feature lest they get fired, and some were fired "for cause" anyway. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1587029446061686784

I'm all for the European don't work unpaid overtime, but what I don't get is the sense of entitlement these people had, when they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind. "WE WILL SHOW YOU ELON" - Show what exactly? That billing and other completely standard cookiecutter SaaS features can't be implemented by other engineers for what is ultimately a near real-time messaging platform with marketing hooks.

Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.

I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.

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

#67

Post by COGlory »

outside1234 wrote: post #20

Honestly, the whole of Twitter should just walk out and wildcat strike until Wednesday morning. The worst he can do is fire you.

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 team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription

- Reports that he may lay people off (unverified)

- Carried in a sink.

None of these things are particularly unreasonable - Twitter owes something like 1 billion in debt payments this year and brings in close to $500 million, so layoffs were probably coming regardless.

I don't really see what the big deal with Musk buying Twitter is, except as cover for being mad about him unbanning people.

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

#68

Post by mattficke »

herodoturtle wrote: post #15
anamexis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the headline misleading? You don't need a formal announcement for something to be news. Particularly since the formal announcement being referred to there is just the announcement that Twitter was acquired by Musk.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was referring to the HN title of this post: "Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts" I opened the article thinking this was a formal announcement. But it's nothing of the sort. It's just speculation at this stage. Hope that clears things up.

“Twitter plans to lay off…” would probably be a more precise headline, yes. It’s more than speculation, though, but you do have to trust the reporters on that.

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

#70

Post by ajkjk »

Barrin92 wrote: post #40

quick question here. I'm completely in the dark about US labour law and such but is it possible to lay people off if the sole purpose is to prevent them from receiving stock compensation? Sounds kind of wild given that it seems expected compensation when you signed a contract to work there in the first place.

I don't know about the law, but it makes a lot of sense of to me. Compensation that's "in your pocket" is compensation you have. RSUs were _always_ a way to keep you around for a payout later (and potentially rescind the payout if they don't want you around). Viewing them as money in your pocket is a mistake.
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