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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

#701

Post by briHass »

moosedev wrote: post #647
roughly wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is who’s writing the code. A core part of a senior engineer’s job is helping to train and mentor junior engineers; it’s not unusual for an entire project to be designed and led by a senior engineer and implemented by more junior engineers. Design reviews don’t result in commits, deep dives on technical implementations don’t result in commits, negotiating an architecture change between groups don’t result…

This. Spending a productive, rewarding half a day pair programming with a receptive junior engineer who isn't sure how to approach a complex task nets them 1+ commits and you 0 commits. Spending half a day chasing after a "loose cannon" engineer who hastily committed bad code nets them 3 commits (the original bad commit, a rollback commit, and the fixed commit) and you 0 commits. How do the individual stats look at t…

All that, in theory, would be tracked. The senior engineer would be able to point to the PRs/MRs with all the helpful comments that led to the code improvements. It wouldn't be hard to show calendar invites or whatever for pair programming sessions, which could be corroborated by asking the junior as well.

It does, however, bring up the point that one should always be mindful of what their output looks like and how easy it is to prove. I'm sure everyone has worked with a 'meeting commando', who loves to discuss edge cases and bikeshed instead of shipping code. Maybe they've carved out a nice niche doing so, and have convinced others in the company of their (dubious) value, but it shouldn't be surprising when the company is sold/acquired/RIFd that someone else might expect someone with an engineering title to have more tangible contributions to point to.

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

#702

Post by snazz »

abledon wrote: post #673
matai_kolila wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn’t seem to be “reforming” Twitter, he seems to be trying desperately to recoup his lost investment. This wasn’t needed and will be looked upon with embarrassment by him and all of tech in a decade.

> After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest-paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000, according to documents viewed by The Post.

That seems normal for an organization of Twitter’s size, doesn’t it? They’ve got to sell ads.

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

#703

Post by Aleksdev »

prmoustache wrote: post #680
Aleksdev wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I’m wrong but it all really depends on the contract. I understand there are labor laws in place but if the person agreed to something then I don’t think California law can do much.

That is usually the opposite. If a contract contain illegal clauses, those clauses are nil.

I see, I worked in America but never in California. That make more sense now.

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

#704

Post by colinmhayes »

pessimizer wrote: post #522
NationalPark wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a company private via LBO, firing a quarter of the staff so you can afford the debt payments, and then streamlining and flipping the profitable parts of the business is the classic corporate raid playbook. So far he's done the LBO part, and is apparently doing the layoff part. Of course, he's the richest person in the world and his finance partners are well connected Saudis, so there are obviously many plausib…

> streamlining and flipping the profitable parts of the business Good luck finding some at Twitter.

Twitter has like 5 billion in revenue. They can probably get profitable, and laying off a quarter of the company is how they’ll do it.

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

#705

Post by phire »

PixyMisa wrote: post #555
pessimizer wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> streamlining and flipping the profitable parts of the business Good luck finding some at Twitter.

Sure. But Musk is betting that Twitter is not profitable because of the people running it. And Twitter was profitable for a while before the marked management change in late 2018.

It's not a result of bad management. Twitter is only non-profitable because they choose to spend all that excess revenue on R&D; Partly because, that's what tax law incentives, partly because that's what investors in tech companies want: Growth

If you look at twitter's own financial filings, they could easily be profitable if they just dropped their R&D budget. The filings claims in the 2021 year it only cost about $500 million to "operate" the platform, and the platform bought in over $5 billion in revenue.

All Musk is doing is switching the company priorities from growth to profit extraction.

In theory, you can drop the R&D spending to zero, and you can sit there claiming a cool 90% profit ratio. However, some of that R&D spending is probably "necessary" to the continued functioning of twitter as a platform, and it's improvement. If you dropped R&D to zero twitter (the platform) would slowly wither and die, but theoretically there is a happy medium where you can maximise for long-term profit and extract the maximum value over time (though, it still might be profitable to run the company into the ground eventually)

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

#706

Post by dboreham »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #585
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…

Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would convert to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he estimated would take between three and six months. Employees would receive their same benefits packages for a year after the deal was finalized and there were no immediate plans for layoffs, he added. So, really those two long sentences should be rewritten: Mr Agrawal, as an officer of the company, e…

"no immediate plans for layoffs" means "layoffs in a few weeks".

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

#707

Post by WalterBright »

Cogito wrote: post #686
WalterBright wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good cause could be Twitter is losing money and has massive debt.

A redundancy is different to being fired, and comes with a payout depending on length of tenure with the company. Fire for cause means "you aren't doing your job properly." Redundancy means "your job is no longer required." If twitter restructures to save money, the jobs that no longer exist have been made redundant.

Layoffs are not firings.

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

#708

Post by colinmhayes »

jasondigitized wrote: post #556
skhr0680 wrote: post #21

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

That 'feature' never made sense to me. "You always miss the advertising shots you don't take" when you force people to sign up first.

I’m sure they crunched the numbers and found that the gain from targeted ads toward the people that sign up is bigger than the loss of people who don’t use Twitter because of the annoyance. Instagram is even worse for what it’s worth.

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

#709

Post by danielheath »

WalterBright wrote: post #632
kenjackson wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If increased employee protection causes you to layoff almost everyone in a country -- you probably had little good business reason to be in that country. Employee protection exists because there's a huge power imbalance. A company who can constantly just say, "we'll fire you if this doesn't get done" and colludes with other companies on such matters makes it very difficult for workers. This is why employee protection…

Whether it does or does not protect them, employees will pay for these protections in the form of lowered salary and fewer jobs available. Nothing comes for free.

That's absolutely true, but in practice most people would experience substantial hardship if they suddenly lost their job.

I wouldn't, but being in a country with employee protections means the people around me are almost never placed in a desparate situation, and I am meaningfully safer because of that.

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

#710

Post by anecdotal1 »

guerrilla wrote: post #698
refulgentis wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precedent is when there's case law backing something. I think you're thinking of Musk's PR and decision making, not the company: there certainly isn't case law for letting go of _25% of the company, for cause_

> Precedent is when there's case law backing something. No, you're thinking of a restricted version of the second definition from Merriam-Webster, while it was clearly the first definition that was meant. precedent. noun 1. an earlier occurrence of something similar 2. a : something done or said that may serve as an example or rule to authorize or justify a subsequent act of the same or an analogous kind a verdict th…

> Musk has precedent

The "has" makes it seem like it was a legal statement. It probably should be been worded differently

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