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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

#811

Post by hef19898 »

hef19898 wrote: post #338
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only an NDA - many companies also require you to sign anti-disparagement clauses, meaning you can have severance clawed back if you speak negatively of the company.

Something like that would never hold up in court, in fact it might even make the whole firing illegal in the first place. Unless, of course, so NDA's would also prevent the employer from speaking negatively about the employee, but those are extremely rare.

Just realized, but to late to edit, that I based my original comment on my home country. And that is not the US. Over here, even hardcore PIPs are regularly thrown out by courts as grounds for termination.

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

#812

Post by shynrou »

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.

Yeah you are absolutely right. Here in germany a lot of companies pay a decent premium on temporary/loan workers and freelancers just to not be bound to then.

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

#813

Post by Aleksdev »

matai_kolila wrote: post #640
canadiantim wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m the opposite. Never was a Musk fan but now that I see him trying to reform twitter I’m very impressed he’s willing to take so much flak for such a direly needed goal.

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.

He literally just bought it. Give the man a chance before writing him off.

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

#814

Post by throwaway1851 »

nemo44x wrote: post #532
throwaway1851 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would certainly recommend any employee in this situation to get legal counsel. Terminating an employee for the purpose of preventing them from satisfying conditions precedent to a payment is a bad-faith move that some courts will set aside.

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

#815

Post by setr »

dendriti wrote: post #784
btilly wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TANSTAAFL. (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.) The downside of employee protections is that it makes companies more reluctant to hire. And also once hired, the salary to be offered is reduced to cover the estimated current value of the future employee protections. These are real downsides, particularly for young people who are trying to get a foot into the corporate ladder. I have even personally witnessed a…

>the salary to be offered is reduced to cover the estimated current value of the future employee protections. This is a fallacy. Companies will pay employees as little as possible. Why would they pay you more just because employee protections were removed?

Competition? If everyone is paying an extra 20% in overhead, then that’s an extra 20% they can’t put down as competing bids for the resource in question

And vice versa… if multiple companies want that resource.. they all have 20% more to bid with

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

#816

Post by throwawaylinux »

UncleMeat wrote: post #180
rglover wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pitfalls of extreme comfort. You have a place like the Bay Area with near perfect weather, obscene amounts of money, and at least until relatively recently, a social environment that lorded you as a "rockstar." You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!" Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explo…

It isn't an entitled attitude to refuse to work over the weekend under threat of losing your job to ship a new feature that isn't actually urgent at the whims of your new CEO who has spent the last few months publicly shitting all over you.

If you're being paid $300,000 it is. Some overtime expectation in reasonable or unforeseen situations is not unusual in many places. For blue collar and minimum wage service workers it can just be a way of life.

The idea that an employee doesn't think think they need to work overtime even though the company has just changed ownership, because they think they know better than the company owner what needs to be done, view his requests as "whims", and believe that because the owner had comments and opinions about the company that singled out no engineer or manager by name that they therefore should be allowed to disregard this direction, is one of the most entitled things I've ever heard. Doubly so if they were one of the ones who had spent the past few years personally shitting all over Musk publicly.

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

#817

Post by honeybadger1 »

themitigating wrote: post #642
honeybadger1 wrote: post #465

I'm holding off my judgements on the Twitterverse until he has a chance to make real change. I don't particularly care for his attention span being focused on Twitter, I would much rather he focus on SpaceX and Tesla considering how successful his watch has been here.

This is unrelated but Tesla has no SUV, new sedans, hatchbacks, or anything that's even a concept. I thought it would grow into a larger car company with a more diverse offering.

Yeah, I actually agree. I wish they had a larger SUV(the model y is considered a small SUV) and it not being the model X. The X is essentially their large SUV/Wagon but it is a price range where there aren't enough other benefits for me to actually make the purchase. The Model S is still the most appealing car they make for my liking and the Cybertruck will eventually be once it's in mass production.

The middle ground I have decided on with my husband(since he wants a bigger car) is Model Y this year and the Cybertruck for me since I have had my reservation since the beginning and I will just wait for it(probably at least another 1-1.5 year even on an early reservation).

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

#818

Post by randomsearch »

Spivak wrote: post #787
randomsearch wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, just following data can be a dangerous path. You have to build things because they’re the right thing to build. You need a cohesive vision not scattershot A-B tests. Unless you only care about short term profit, of course. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That’s why the Facebooks die and the Apples and Googles last.

So what kind of experiment do you run to capture that dissatisfaction? Doesn’t have to be a/b. Just anything qualitative that doesn’t boil down to making decisions purely based on feelings.

Talking to people.

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

#819

Post by throwawaylinux »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #234
phpisthebest wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you the viral "day in the Life" video that was going around in the last week or so did not help the situation much.

Loathe to give outrage reposters views but here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc The video was posted by a remote financial analyst who was visiting the SF office for the first time. She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time. The perks are nice, maybe too nice you could argue, but the notion that the video proves sh…

Ouch, that's a pretty horrific video. I don't know if that kind of thing goes down well in the "influencer" or the SV tech scenes, but outside those bubbles it's clearly going to come across as narcissistic, entitled, and lazy. Which is unfortunate because I'm sure she's a wonderful person and a hard and competent worker, but there's a serious lack of judgement making that public.

She is shown scheduling a 30 minute meeting which seems to be the only work done before getting ready for lunch. After lunch plays foosball and meditation and exploring. Now that might be entirely reasonable if she comes to work at 11am and leaves in the evening or clocks back on to do some work at night, or did a bunch of other work before lunch. And having a lot of meetings is what happens when you're a remote worker who comes into the office once a year. None of that comes across to in the video though so what it actually looks like is about 3 hours of meetings (which are mostly taking pictures of one another), and the rest of it lounging around eating and drinking and unwinding.

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

#820

Post by realgeniushere »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #769
bigiain wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Musk made an offer, voluntarily closed off his ability to back out, then tried to back out and couldn't. He has been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Twitter's management (or outmaneuvered himself, same effect). So I'm not super high on his ability to foresee consequences at the moment. Also, because of being outmaneuvered, he may be seeking any chance to stick his finger in the eye of the people who did it. That the logi…

I think it was a good gamble. If old management had budged by even 1% or 2% of the original deal, the savings would have easily paid for all the lawyers Musk and Twitter had to hire. Just a calculated risk that didn’t pay off. That’s how calculated risks go sometimes.
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