Twitters staff count has felt bloated at ~7,500 employees and I can’t help but think of “rest and vest” clips from HBO’s Silicon Valley, especially during Covid WFH.
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
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even California still has at-will employment. He doesn’t need cause, or anyone else to agree on what that cause is.
He might if he wants their options not to vest. [Edit: Or to have to pay their golden parachute.]
I wonder if even Musk would be so publicly ruthless as that?
I wonder how many his employees in Tesla/SpaceX/where ever are currently incentivised by stock options, who’d watch their boss doing that to Twitter people and wonder why they bother working evenings and weekends, if the options can be yanked as cruelly as that?
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What makes you think that previous management needlessly employed unproductive workers when they could have easily not done so? Do you think that Elon Musk has some special magic insight that makes him get the same amount of work done with half the resources? I know some people at Twitter and some people at Musk's companies and I don't think they are fundamentally run differently.
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Guardian does something similar.
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#625Earlier 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.
> wishful thinking
I have no stake in the matter. My supposition that some employees simply stopped working comes from my experience seeing similar things happen at other companies during periods of uncertainty, and from my knowledge that quite a few twitter employees were very uncertain about their future with twitter.
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#626Earlier 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.
Sure. But a code review of their checkins will reveal their productivity pretty quick. Any one claiming 10x (or even 0.75x) productivity would want some very good supporting evidence if they have zero activity in the source control for a month. You want some great specification documents or API documentation or platform architecture diagrams or something…
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
The true big brain 10x programmer is pushing -100 lines of code per sprint.
The true big brained programmer sat in a meeting and prevented a team of 25 people from wasting 6 months.
Sure. That’s super valuable.
But I hope they have something productive to show for the other 20 odd days that month they collected their paycheque for…
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#628Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and codetermination. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
exists in most northern and western european companies aswell.. Unions in europe also seem far less militant than those in the US.
> Unions in europe also seem far less militant
That's because unions are an integral part of the way many of the countries socio-political systems work. In Norway, for instance, the trades unions and the employers get together once a year to hammer out what is called tarriflønn, essentially the going rate for each broad type of job. The state provides a referee for the meetings whose job is to keep them on track and to encourage both sides to compromise. Unions and companies work together rather than fight each other, most of the time.
But this can only work if there is a broad consensus that we are all in the same boat and that we will all be better off if we work together.
The attitude, that appears to be common, in the US that employers are always exploitative, employees are always lazy and thieving, that the government is just a parasite, and that the aphorism "Good enough for government work" is a synonym for delivering shoddy work means that no one trusts anyone so you end up fighting all the time.
Re: Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
#630Earlier 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.
In case this wasn't clear, when I say "no code" I mean no commits, nothing they can point to as evidence of doing any work. Afaic, commits removing code count for at least as much as those adding code. And if they've spent the past month adding documentation to the intranet wiki or something like that, there should be logs they can show to prove it.