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Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

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Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#941
post #208

Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure…

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Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying Twitter just to destroy it for the lols. Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.

Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand the scale of his plans for twitter.

“Bankruptcy is a possibility”

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#943
Good. Remote work is on it's way out across the industry. It causes people to not perform very well and causes slacking off (I know this of myself from personal experience). It also makes it harder for newer people to learn things and makes it feel less like you are a team and more like you're a bunch of independent people with no connection to the company.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#944
post #301
post #208

Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure…

> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while someho…

> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision

That's a bold assumption -- that there is a vision

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#945
post #357

Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was: 1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's cry…

Elon's the #1 type there. He's been shown to be talking to a lot of people at Twitter to get a good understanding of how the product and company works and removing people as he finds it being unrelated to the future success of the company.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#946

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Highest impact is mid project. You know, to make it hurt.

Right, really punish the rest of the team who has to make up for your absence. That'll teach Elon.

It would secure their position tho and make elon appreciate them more.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#947

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision. Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquito…

> Twitter isn’t going to disappear You seem more confident than Musk is reported to have been in today's sudden all-hands meeting; what do you know that Musk doesn’t? EDIT: see, e.g., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/musk-tell...

Bankruptcy isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good thing, depending on how you use it.

People who do not understand bankruptcy laws often perpetuate wrong myths. Bankruptcy is just a legal insolvency mechanism to stave off problematic creditors, while you find way to handle assets against the liabilities of the company. A bankruptcy isn't always the end of the world, and smart businessmen know this.

Musk has a ton of people advising him on legal issues. It's possible that he's making the wrong business moves, but the fact that he's publicly seeing ahead at the possibility of bankruptcy, tells us that he's navigating the waters cognisant of avoiding it rather than to ensure the outcome arrives.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020 the company I worked for did ~25% temp salary reduction so they could feel safe that they could keep everyone employed and such. 3 months after everyone did it they said "thank you thank you we are so happy we don't need to let anyone go". 2 months later they laid off ~50% of the development team and people throughout the company... At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying desp…

> Companies lie to employees all the time. My friends and I have no loyalty to our employers at this point. Big or small, we've all been burned. Some places are just less unpleasant than others. My bar is so low that as long as no one is screaming at me or threatening my coworkers I usually call that a good day. Getting out of retail helped.

My wife used to work in retail. Compared to front-line retail staff, we knowledge workers are all a bunch of coddled teddybears.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#949
post #757
post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, the actual best approach for the wellbeing of employee is to combine these two moves. Give employees the choice between taking a voluntary severance package or coming back to the office. Make it known that a round of layoffs is possible depending on the number of people who take the severance. That way no one is misled into moving and the company doesn't have to be as concerned with the distribution of peop…

I don't think I've ever seen a company leave a question of "possible" layoffs up in the air like that. If they happen the announcement is made the same day, otherwise you have people questioning their employment for months.

You’d be surprised. I’m currently in the “questioning my employment phase”, with 15% salary deferment.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#950

The timing of this is the content - not the ending of remote work issue. It's using the news cycle and a hot button issue (end remote work) to bury the regulatory liability of the headline of the 3 chief complaince officers resignation the day before a FTC complaince filing.

it's almost like the headline that was buried about Twitter and Facebook colluding with Biden's DHS to "police disinformation", where social media companies were shills for government propaganda > the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.” https://the…

"propaganda" like "please wear a mask, we have a novel airborne virus that could overwhelm our healthcare system" lol

You act like it's not a big problem that social media platforms are constantly exploited by bad actors spreading disinformation at scale.

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