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

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

#611

Post by shawabawa3 »

root_axis wrote: post #593
luckylion wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you differentiate between workers and executives? Is the CEO a worker if he doesn't own the company? Tying it to the salary makes sense to me. If you get paid minimum wage, asking you to work overtime without additional pay is unjust. You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.

Executives are different because of their compensation structure. When you're being paid via stock and option grants, money being used to pay "workers" is coming directly out of your pocket, so in this way executives are naturally a different class of employee.

Most FANG senior software engineers have the majority of their comp as stock, so by that metric they are more "executives" than "workers"

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

#612

Post by mft_ »

jupp0r wrote: post #581
rurp wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Elon or anyone else actually has strong reason to believe that certain employees are dead weight I'm fine with them being laid off. Given the speed and general dysfunction of this particular case there's basically no chance that's what is going on here.

Exactly. If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore. Even if you fire them, that's a surefire way of making sure that the best 5% of people leave the company anyways do to the depressing atmosphere this creates.

> If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore.

This would assume that the previous management had an incentive to cut costs and remove 50% of their workforce... which is probably not the case at all.

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

#613

Post by whateveracct »

ac29 wrote: post #564
whateveracct wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the downvoters - google the WARN act

The WARN act only means you need to give 60 days notice in certain types of mass layoffs. Given that Twitter hasnt done any mass layoffs yet, speculating on whether or not they gave enough notice under the act is a bit premature.

Twitter hasn't, but it seems that there is some internal tension around it. Making working conditions worse to force people to quit, setting impossible deadlines to fire en masse "with cause," and just generally shedding employees but not calling it a layoff all seem to be in play.

Elon is interacting and trying to dodge this act. He seems to want to cut Twitter's workforce at a scale that the WARN act covers.

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

#614

Post by itronitron »

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.

I'd be surprised if more than 20% of employees at Twitter are developers.

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

#615

Post by _-david-_ »

agentdrtran wrote: post #490
marak830 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

major news outlets like wapo have a lot of issues, like so many issues, but making up sources is not one of them.

They don't have to make up a source to be taken for a ride. Look at CNBC eating up the story about two guys (Ligma and Johnson) who were supposedly fired. If the source is anonymous we can't check they worked at Twitter.

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

#616

Post by fzeroracer »

nharada wrote: post #469
saurik wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elsewhere in this thread, people are discussing a potentially-credible (but maybe you disagree) report on this from Gergely Orosz that does not paint this as "only the 3 senior executives". https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1587042365084209153?... > I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend…

I don't understand why so many people celebrate when Elon treats his underlings like trash. Is it because people hate Twitter and think if you work there you deserve this? Is it because they want to have Elon's level of power and fame where the rules don't apply to them? Something else?

All of the above, plus a fair bit of delusion. The amount of people I've seen pretending to be engineers in order to normalize the most ridiculous things he says or does has been growing and when pressed they often just vanish or stop responding.

That said, should Twitter eventually fall apart it will never be the fault of Musk. It will be because insiders preventing his vision, or the government blocked him, or any number of excuses.

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

#617

Post by devmor »

memish wrote: post #540
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.

> 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.

>Twitter was already planning layoffs.

Their CEO told them no layoffs were planned in the immediate future just a few months ago.

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

#619

Post by jimt1234 »

iammjm wrote: post #481

I used to be a big Musk fan. But the longer it gets, the more i start to dislike him. He starts turning into a Mad King

I still have a lot of respect for Musk as bold business exec. But my respect for him as a person dropped to near-zero when he promoted the baseless conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi.

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

#620

Post by itronitron »

vxNsr wrote: post #583
sulam wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taylor Leese is a respected Twitter engineering manager who tweeted on Sunday that he was no longer working at Twitter. While it's remotely conceivable that he quit, it's much more likely he was fired. I had reports from friends who worked there that they were asked to stay available over the weekend, presumably for situations like this, or requests from the "war room" group that has been setup.

What is an engineering manager as it relates to actually writing code? One of the things Elon said was that there appears to be 3 managers for every engineer. I understand the need for a few PMs but if there really was a 3:1 ratio that’s just absurd.

My understanding of Twitter is that it has, or used to have, many internal teams that do 'social media consultancy projects' for prospective clients presumably to facilitate ad campaigns. In that case I would expect everyone on those teams to have manager as a job title, much like 'director' in design firms.
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