Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers to Please Come Back

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-06/twitter-now-asks-some-fired-workers-to-please-come-back

by ceejayoz • 4 years ago

140 176 4 years ago

bloomberg.com

pinewurst• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/VLCqz

cbtacy2• 4 years ago

Can we now, at long last, kill the myth that Elon Musk is a business genius?

aliswe• 4 years ago

Not just yet.

Vt71fcAqt7• 4 years ago

I realized Elon wasn't a scientist or engineer a long time ago. But a good businessman I thought he was and I think it's too early to say in this case whether that holds true. One issue is that since the company is now private, we most likley will not get to see it's profit. All we will have is what employees or musk says. So I still think it's too soon to make conclusions.

lottamus• 4 years ago

Sure, but I’m really interested to see what he does with http://x.com

rdtwo2• 4 years ago

He’s just a young Donald trump

michael1999• 4 years ago

The twitter bankruptcy will be a very public process.

ianai3• 4 years ago

No good businessperson runs around as half-cocked in bright, broad daylight as this guy. I’ve heard plenty of large fund managers say he’s too overboard to take seriously enough to invest in his businesses.

spoils192• 4 years ago

I agree with you. It's simple - if you're against Musk, you're against the betterment of humanity.

ajmurmann• 4 years ago

I have very strong, very mixed feelings about Musk and am not sure if he is a great businessmen or not. However, I did appreciate DHH's blog post about Job's returning to Apple. Massive layoffs and Jobs admitted that mistakes will be made, but at least decisions are being made. Short worthwhile read: https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...

Edit: auto-correct typo

pessimizer• 4 years ago

I wish the Elon anti-fans would wait for Elon fans to say something, then respond to them, rather than posting 900 comments picking fights with people who haven't even posted yet. This obsession with adoring or condemning love-hate branded celebrities as quickly and loudly as possible is unbelievably grating.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 4 years ago

I thought the hyperloop was that moment but in fairness he managed to get investment for that shit.

shrubble• 4 years ago

So maybe 36 out of 3700?

BrentOzar2• 4 years ago

I would love to listen in on those negotiations.

If you’re reading this, and Twitter wants you back, I hope you ask for a contract with a year’s pay in advance, due before returning to work, at 10x your prior rate.

After all, you must be one of those 10x developers if Elon is willing to eat crow and ask you to come back.

forgetfulness3• 4 years ago

Just having those emails in hand would be almost a voucher for negotiating higher salary when looking for another job, they certify that you were one of the people that were vital for Twitter to run.

onion2k• 4 years ago

Being asked to go back just means it's cheaper to get you to return than it is to recruit someone to do your old job.

BrentOzar2• 4 years ago

Being asked to go back just means it's cheaper to get you to return than it is to recruit someone to do your old job.

Only at your old rate.

seadan832• 4 years ago

For software, the existing employees will always be cheaper. It has been argued that an engineers value is captured most in their mental model of the system. EG: Want a new feature in a system I built and maintained? Boom, here are the touch points, the gotchyas, and here is the roadmap to get if done in three days. Anyone new to that system will first say, cool, give me about 3 weeks to learn this code, and then maybe another 7 while we implement it and work through all of the trip wires we did not know about.

kaba05• 4 years ago

And firing them was just an insanely dumb thing significantly increasing expenses.

akmarinov2• 4 years ago

There’s likely no negotiations. More of a “could you come back please?” And you either accept because you don’t have anything lined up or tell them to go pound sand

kaba05• 4 years ago

Well, if they are indeed that important to the company, then they do have quite a large leverage.

Cthulhu_6• 4 years ago

I'm 99% confident that anyone with Twitter on their resumè will have no problems landing another job.

zzzeek4• 4 years ago

Can't wait to see the HN "just give Elon a chance to put his brilliant plans in motion!" crowd to explain this one to us. Enlighten us please !

qeternity4• 4 years ago

HN seems pretty anti Elon, no?

d23• 4 years ago

I can’t speak for the rest of HN, but his childish narcissistic megalomania certainly rubs me the wrong way.

kevinh2• 4 years ago

Depending on the thread it can go either way. There are large contingents on both sides as Musk is quite divisive.

allenrb• 4 years ago

It varies. I’ve been a SpaceX (and thus Elon) fan since they were unsuccessfully launching Falcon 1’s. EM’s willingness to share information with the space fan community won him a lot of admirers. I was certainly willing to overlook many of his other failings as a result.

That’s become harder in the last few years and practically impossible in 2022. At this point, I am desperately hoping for SpaceX to get Starship/Superheavy flying before Elon manages to screw that up as well.

I’m not a trained psychiatric professional but it looks to me as if his extreme wealth and success has exacerbated some pre-existing tendencies and turned him into a (danger, medical jargon ahead) full-blown mess. It’s a shame to watch.

nrmitchi• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what the "elon support" split on HN is, but in the past it seems to have been rather 50/50.

I suspect that HN has recently seemed more anti-elon because the anti-elon crowd has a lot of bullshit to point to recently, and the pro-elon crowd doesn't really have good defenses to most of it.

awb2• 4 years ago

There was tons of excitement over the years about his companies transforming the world and his successes there have been spectacular.

But over the past few years he’s become much more vocal about current events unrelated to his companies. He has every right to do it, but whether you’re a cable news commentator or Musk, the more you weigh in on social issues the more polarizing you become.

bradhe• 4 years ago

Reality has an anti-Elon bias.

thordenmark2• 4 years ago

A man has to be full of great melancholies to accomplish what he has. This clearly has positive and negative sides. Judging from the accomplishments of great people throughout history you cannot have one without the other.

In the case of Twitter something had to be done. It was too powerful of a public forum and was mismanaged and run by extremists and exacerbated existing divisions, turning them into real rifts. If half a country feels they are being actively suppressed, demonized, and treated unfairly that is a recipe for disaster. Was Elon the guy to fix it? I dunno who else would be crazy enough to try. And his roots are in web tech so his experience may help.

kaba05• 4 years ago

I very much hope most everyone is anti billionaire-(for the time being)-manchilds-who-regularly-throws-tantrums-on-twitter-and-who-is-so-egomaniac-that-he-had-to-buy-the-title-founder-for-a-company-(which otherwise lives on government subsidies)-he-only-pumped-money-into-largely-seeded-by-daddy’s-emerald-mine.

jjgreen• 4 years ago

No, if anti, then anti Musk. I'm not on first-name terms with narcissists.

forgetfulness3• 4 years ago

From the moment that he started to fight off this purchase in court, it's needed a lot of mental gymnastics to defend the genius of his moves regarding the purchase of an underperforming social network.

Are these the plays of a proverbial multi-dimensional chess genius that are beyond mortal ken, or one clumsy attempt after another to salvage a bad situation that he put himself in?

In some other HN thread related to this, people worked out the math behind the layoff of half of Twitter's workforce days into taking over: assuming revenue remained the same, the company would be profitable enough to cover the loans taken to purchase (with itself as collateral!)

electrondood• 4 years ago

Actually, this is in line with the philosophy at Tesla's/Elon companies of "if you're not occasionally replacing components you deleted, then you aren't removing enough."

rtsil3• 4 years ago

The best employees is no employee.

aksss• 4 years ago

Tuning a guitar string often involves going too low and then raising back up to the right note. Disruptive to the workers, but Musk is tuning a guitar not running a daycare - requirements and concerns are different. I’m sure he’s less worried about the optics of correction than you are. Add your own value judgements accordingly.

Personally I can’t make myself see this as a humanitarian disaster — these employees have known the risk was on the horizon for many months, are eminently employable, high-functioning, with presumably good professional networks and resumes. They’ll land on their feet, and have themselves to blame if they didn’t prepare accordingly. Plenty of other drama in the world to worry about, much of it more severe than ex-twitter ee’s on the open job market thirsty for talent.

zzzeek4• 4 years ago

Elon is an intense narcissist so he absolutely cares how bad it looks. I am more worried about the workers who are still stuck there rather than the ones who were let go. It will be total chaos for quite awhile there before it settles into whatever former shell of itself , stuffed with ads and sponsored scams, it's on track to become, a depressing place to work for anyone with a conscience.

Cthulhu_6• 4 years ago

I mean yeah some reorganizations were probably needed, but he seems to take a shotgun approach to it. Fire half the people, whip the leftovers into making a new feature to be done within days, shun the actual people using the platform by removing their verification, demanding payment, and having them banned anyway when they cause him butthurt, etc.

He could've done all that much more smoothly. Now though, Twitter is spiraling.

awinder• 4 years ago

“This is why Elon is a genius for keeping these employees on staff for 3 months instead of laying them off; now he can just get them back to work or they refuse and he saves 3 months of salary!”

akira2501• 4 years ago

I personally can't wait for the high strung emotions on both sides to die out. There are people that actively cheer for Elon to fail and to take the entire company with him, and others that actively hope he's going to single-handedly restore free speech.

Meanwhile.. it's a corporation that trades in short messages between it's users. Is any of this really worth the emotional investment? It's an odd time in America, but casting all your hopes and dreams through the lens of what Elon Musk does today or where Twitter is tomorrow seems to me to be the worst way to approach it.

Karrot_Kream• 4 years ago

The fact that there's a new, highly upvoted post about Twitter every few hours on this site is ridiculous. I'm waiting for it to pass I guess.

atarian• 4 years ago

How do you know this is legitimate news?

recuter6• 4 years ago

This article says they are trying to bring back "dozens" of employees. 3700 were fired. Of those apparently some were fired due to clerical error. What is there to explain?

There is a bunch of mass layoffs happening in other tech companies (and across the economy), are we going to pretend they will all go smoothly?

Actually come to think of it, without this acquisition Twitter would still have been forced to let a bunch of people go anyhow regardless of who happens to be the CEO. Possibly just as many. Probably with less severance... but definitely with nicer emails...

Take a deep breath.

rufflez2• 4 years ago

Fired due to clerical error! That’s a new one, and quite motivating for the employee who is no longer fired.

itsdrewmiller• 4 years ago

Nobody else is cutting 50%, and the twitter severance isn't particularly generous either relative to other layoffs.

zzzeek4• 4 years ago

Dozens of employees, some of which may be essential to critical operations if they are in fact this desperate to get them back. If Twitter is down for 24 hours because they fired the three people that know the affected subsystem the best, the "it's only dozens out of 5700" proportion says nothing about actual business impact.

gorbachev• 4 years ago

Surely normal people like us can't possibly understand the 5D chess Elon plays.

ShredKazoo3• 4 years ago

The pro-Elon redpill here is that he's already had at least 4 unambiguously successful companies (zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX). So maybe we are just observing what it takes to be extremely successful: Move fast and break stuff. If you want to be a multibillionaire you're going to have to make a lot of big mistakes, faster than anyone thinks possible.

Additionally I think "verified users get priority in replies" has the potential to be absolutely killer. Everyone knows that clout chasing is huge on Twitter. I could easily see a spiral like so:

* Initially 5% of daily actives buy the check marks, mostly just to own the libs (Fox News loves Elon btw). But the newborn blue checks are everywhere in replies. They're accumulating followers like no tomorrow.

* Others begin to follow suit. $8/month is a small price to pay for clout. Remember, that's what they're all there for. "If anyone tells you they don't want more twitter followers, they're lying."

* 10% of the userbase has bought a blue check. 20%. The anti-Elon folks are holding out. But their voices are growing quieter and quieter.

* The entire tenor of the site begins to change. The loudest voices are the Elon fans who bought the check mark early. His politics become dominant on the site.

* Eventually the anti-Elon folks either ragequit or end up purchasing the checkmark. Petty tyranny and clout chasing are kind of their thing. It's a case of irresistible force meets immovable object. Endgame seems hard to predict.

kivle• 4 years ago

You missed one: * Russia buys Blue for all of their Twitter bot-farms, giving Twitter tons of extra income, and Russia even better influence over US voters.

esoterica• 4 years ago

Did you see how hard Elon tried to get out of the Twitter deal? Remember how he made up fake excuses about bots to try and torpedo the merger? Even Elon doesn't think Elon can make the Twitter deal work.

theonething6• 4 years ago

Here's DHH's take.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...

zzzeek4• 4 years ago

" the focus on the customer.... is uncannily similar."

what is he smoking? Musk literally banned the head of a major advertising organization concerned about where Musk was taking the site in terms of it being friendly to advertising (https://www.axios.com/2022/11/06/musk-twitter-marketers-adve...). Read Josh Marshall's thread at https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1588679838306799617. Musk is absolutely doing everything the customer does not want (the customer being: advertisers), and they have already ran for the exits.

nodesocket• 4 years ago

I don't know how we can all believe a lot of the saga and news that is coming out of Twitter. After all the misinformation and trolls (pretending to be laid off employees) and culture of misinformation and manipulation we can trust much of the media coming out on Twitter.

atum47• 4 years ago

It seems that this website asked me to accept cookies with a Pop up that covers the whole screen (mobile) after accepting (only apparently option) it was still behind a subscription.

Could HN parse links and put how many cookies each website is trying to force you to accept?

brigandish• 4 years ago

Turn off Javascript, and possibly CSS and you can read it. (I browse the web now with both off by default)

awinter-py• 4 years ago

tweeps understandably upset but if he is really offering to buy them a horse I think that is more than fair?

ProjectArcturis2• 4 years ago

It's not about fairness, it's about Musk making terrible decisions.

fm26062• 4 years ago

If I were asked back I'd take it (hopefully with an increase in salary) then I'd actively search for another job. Once I landed it I'd give zero day notice. Fuck them.

I understand I could be potentially hurting coworkers by adding additional work to their plate but Twitter didn't give 2 shits about the people left behind and the work that they would have to take on.

Why is it corporations can "layoff" without notice but as an employee you are expected to give 2 weeks notice? I guess one could argue that if the corp gives a severance pay then that makes up for sudden layoff. But it doesn't. Even if I have a savings for emergencies employee sponsored health insurance will eventually end. Then COBRA kicks in and there goes your emergency savings if you have a family.

Of course the whole U.S. health insurance shit-show is for another discussion but when you have a family AND a serious health issues, health insurance is front and center on one's mind.

If I never had to worry about health insurance and have the ability to go get the care I need/want would take a huge burden off of my shoulders and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Sorry for the rant.

ianai3• 4 years ago

The at will is both ways, legally. It’s the massive unequal market power that forces two weeks notice.

s1k3• 4 years ago

They were given 90 days severance… which is like 6 standard notice periods.

seadan832• 4 years ago

Not the original plan to do that, so there was a forcing function. Check further down for the comments noting that severance is there to cover the WARN period.

boplicity• 4 years ago

The U.S. healthcare system traps people in companies, for fear of losing access to reliable healthcare. A system that was completely independent from employers would be much more beneficial to employees. Plus, it would save huge administrative costs for private companies. This would especially benefit small companies, but, really, it would make the job of running any company much easier.

ianai3• 4 years ago

In that universe people might possibly work for lower wages. It’s an income effect. Plus the present value of future healthcare costs goes far down too (individually and in aggregate).

imustbeevil2• 4 years ago

Healthcare.gov. We've had that system for 12 years. I've never had employer healthcare, it was way more expensive than private insurance in Hawaii, which anyone can get and you auto-qualify for enrollment if you change jobs or move.

https://www.navapbc.com/insights/twelve-years-of-healthcare-...

wilg• 4 years ago

I have noticed several people in my life seeming to vastly overestimate the cost of getting healthcare through the healthcare.gov exchanges. If you leave your job, you can just do that. It’s much cheaper than the COBRA price, which I think people are looking at. For many people, it shouldn’t be a huge problem to get insurance this way. (I would still prefer single-payer!)

thordenmark2• 4 years ago

That is certainly a hot take. When a company is losing $4 million a day drastic measures are in order to save the company so the remaining employees still have a job. Having worked in tech for over 20 years and being on both sides of layoffs I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.

It definitely looks like Twitter was a hot mess and needed an amputation to save the patient.

spacedcowboy• 4 years ago

Yeah, cry me a river for the poor heart-broken decision makers, who (in fact) aren't actually losing their job.

rtsil3• 4 years ago

AFAIK the company didn't lose $4M/day until the advertisers halted their ad buys because of the uncertainties brought by the new management.

fm26062• 4 years ago

I have no doubt that for most of the people making the decision of which person to lay off it would be hard. They are human.

But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day? If so, then hard to have sympathy for them.

If the decisions were being made above the managers, in the C-suite, then it is their asses (which we all know Elon sacked them as well). If I had to make an educated guess I would assume their severance pay is orders of magnitude greater than the 90 day severance that the regular Joe and Jane got.

So let's say the decisions that cost the company $4M/day came from the top, not middle managers and not the end employee. The people who say "we have to lay off X amount of people, today, tomorrow, ASAP" are not the ones who are doing the actual telling individuals they are laid off. So in their mind this is "the price of doing business". Again, fuck 'em. Why should the individual who got laid off, rehired, found a new job then give the requisite 2 week notice? It's the price of doing business.

In my mind either we are going to take out the human aspect or we aren't and both sides need to take the same approach. It can't be "it's business" on one side and "the human element" on the other. It can be, but I'm not going to play that game. In a couple of years (if that long) I'm going to be forgotten about and the business will probably keep on keepin' on.

gregors• 4 years ago

He is directly the reason they are losing $4 million a day. They weren't losing anywhere near that before he took control.

kaba05• 4 years ago

It sounds like it just recently got some potentially terminal disease, so maybe the cure is to cut the tumor out, instead of all the limbs? But it might be just too late.

fzeroracer• 4 years ago

Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?

Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.

Only in this case he cut off a whole hand.

bb882• 4 years ago

I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.

We want C-Suite execs to think of employees as people. But in reality the C-suite execs just think of them as another expense, albeit a necessary one.

At the C-Suite, everything is a number: number of employees, income, expenses, etc. The most important ones are cash on hand, and profit after expenses.

Here's a thought experiment: If Elon offered you $100 million to fire half the company would you do it? Personally I'd have a hard time saying no to that.

lultimouomo2• 4 years ago

Of those 4M/day, 2.7M are the interest on the leveraged buyout debt that Musk had Twitter take, they weren't there before!

In comparison, assuming an everage yearly cost per fired employee of 200K, by firing 3000 of them they are saving 1.6M a day.

Musk added 2.7M/day of purely financial cost, and then tried to reduce the damage by firing half the company and it's not even nearly enough!

And this is before the lost income from advertising...

I won't pretend to know business better than the richest man in the world, but from down here this sure looks like the train wreck of the century. We'll see I guess.

gw984• 4 years ago

I would probably take the job and proceed to do fuck all until they fired me again.

A company tried to get me to come back and do handover after terminating a contract in breach a few years back. Agreement was a month. I did nothing for the entire month because they didn’t specify a deliverable. Due to working through an agency that was larger than the company I got paid and they got told to piss off when they complained.

fknorangesite• 4 years ago

Sorry for the rant.

Don't be. These are things worth ranting about; and even moreso they are things worth acting upon.

There are elections in the US this week, right?

orev• 4 years ago

Why is it corporations can "layoff" without notice but as an employee you are expected to give 2 weeks notice?

Both sides can equally give as much notice as they want. 2 weeks is only customary, but also seems to be rarely honored on both sides. If an employee gives 2 weeks, they’re often just walked out the door and stay on the payroll for 2 weeks (for any job more complex than menial tasks, no meaningful transition can be completed in 2 weeks, so it’s better to reduce any risks immediately). Companies often give severance packages longer than 2 weeks to avoid being sued, on condition of signing some paperwork to that effect.

dchftcs• 4 years ago

The company needs to bite the bullet to secure a short-term contract that stipulates certain things need to be done on a (expensive) fixed-cost basis. No reason to expect any of these employees to work the same way anymore, and they might even present some risk, so extra carrot is needed to keep them around for critical duties and hand-over.

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

If I were asked back I'd take it

Since the workers mostly aren't actually fired, but in a no-access, no-duties period between notice and dismissal while still employed and on payroll, its “resume duties, quit, or be fired for cause”.

MangoCoffee• 4 years ago

"Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves"

https://archive.ph/VLCqz

jmclnx• 4 years ago

Sounds familiar. Where I worked years ago, the company asked for volunteers to be laid off, many people, took the package (1 years salary). IT was not allowed to volunteer.

Mang. did not keep count, some Departments were emptied out. So after a couple of weeks, many people were re-hired and was able to keep their '1 year salary bonus'.

Many people in IT left once the re-hirings happened. The company went chapter 11 about 5 years later.

akmarinov2• 4 years ago

Accept to leave for 1 year salary? I’d do that any time. It’s a free year off, you can even start working somewhere else if you get bored and just be 1 year ahead finance wise.

That’s a great deal.

Cthulhu_6• 4 years ago

Plus generally speaking, changing jobs will get you a raise as well.

jrochkind14• 4 years ago

Yeah, sounds like a company desperate to reduce the metric of ongoing operating cost, no matter what it did to anything else. I would guess private equity shenanigans.

dirkg• 4 years ago

Whatever happened to the WARN lawsuits against Musk? How is he allowed to layoff 40-50% of staff with zero notice?

bluedino• 4 years ago

Do they apply since they are still being paid?

chowells• 4 years ago

Lawsuits take more than 1 week. They are coming, in time. Unfortunately, their only penalty is monetary. So the answer to your latter question is "he can pay the fine."

ProjectArcturis2• 4 years ago

He's paying 3 months severance.

int_19h• 4 years ago

So when he's bragging that severance is larger than it had to be, it's basically a lie?

throwawayhaxor• 4 years ago

because severance covers the WARN period

reset2023• 4 years ago

Twitter has lost its prestige. Is there any company in the world that could fill this void?

vinyl7• 4 years ago

From what I've been told, this is common at large companies. Lay off staff then hire them back as contractors.

awb2• 4 years ago

California is one of the strictest states around the contractor / employee designation.

I’m not sure of all the rules but I think working more than 20hrs or getting the majority of your contractor income from a single source raises a lot of flags.

davesque• 4 years ago

If part of the fitness criteria involved printing out code written in the last 6 months on paper, it was predictable that they would have accidentally let go of many important contributors in a 50% layoff. Color me not surprised.

Turns out running a large technology platform takes more than just wishful thinking and personal brand stunts.

byyll2• 4 years ago

I'd be happy if I stop hearing about Twitter and it's alternatives.

simondotau2• 4 years ago

I don’t mean to be snarky, but the solution is exercising self restraint. The world will continue on just fine if you stop engaging with the topic.

spoils192• 4 years ago

Agreed. It's extremely easy to ignore all news regarding this topic - leaving a comment stating that it's difficult says more about the commenter itself.

gw984• 4 years ago

How it looked in his head:

Swoop in to the sounds of Jan Hammer’s Crocketts Theme with his Tesla staff entourage, you’re fired you’re fired, sit down, hack the planet, job done, planet bows before him, free speech restored.

How it turned out:

“Um, boss, we’ve spent the last three days trying to get a build running in Jenkins. Might want to get the dudes you fired back.”. While all the advertisers distance themselves from the unravelling incel, racist, sexist shit show.

The guy’s a fucking idiot. Nothing else to it.

dissent• 4 years ago

The world's full of them though. I don't really get the passion behind the anti-Elon camp. It sounds personal. Isn't it just some billionaire doing what they do?

Watchwatcher2• 4 years ago

It does feel unnaturally influenced, I agree. Follow the money, I suppose.

Who stands to gain from twitter and/or elons failure? We can speculate for fun. Certainly Bill Gates, with his half billion short on Tesla. He'd have the money to influence social media. We already know Microsoft games HN from when the CEO was bragging about it to shareholders. So it can be done.

Who else? Oil and Gas probably hate him for Teslas battery tech.

The entire automotive industry would be interested in piling on.

... NASA? That doesn't seem like them but who knows.

Everyone on twitter who already hated him would be doubling down.

I figure most are just secretly jealous. I am.

gw984• 4 years ago

I can assure you my disdain spans more than just Musk.

Cthulhu_6• 4 years ago

Yeah but they're keeping out of the news at the minute. There's no need for whataboutism imo, they're all pricks, but at the moment it's Musk (and Zuckerberg) failing hard.

Yizahi• 4 years ago

It's the unrealised promise or illusion, at least for me. I was a huge fan of him, mostly due to SpaceX, and still follow bigger events or announcements regarding his company. But he really disappointed me with his personal opinions and management practices, multiple times, even before Twitter debacle.

On the other hand I don't have any hopes for Bezos or some Comcast or BP billionaires as an example, so they don't disappoint me much :)

pella• 4 years ago

see the top comments.

"Allegedly Oracle did this years ago when they had layoffs-- employees were let go, then asked if they wanted to return. Apparently, if they said no, the company considered the exit a resignation instead of a layoff, and would refuse severance. If oracle was then taken to court over the lack of severance by former employees, those employees' refusal to rejoin the company could be used to avoid an unfavorable ruling for Oracle."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488447

notacoward• 4 years ago

Are you suggesting that Elon Musk is the new Larry Ellison?

siggen• 4 years ago

Elon and Larry are close friends.

kergonath3• 4 years ago

They sound rather similar these days.

simondotau2• 4 years ago

Surely it would have been more remarkable if a company lays off 3,700 employees and exactly zero mistakes are made. A company like Twitter is impossibly complex, and it's very likely that some number of people are legitimately important, but their importance cannot be seen from a top-down view.

I see it as a healthy sign that Twitter management are rapidly identifying and rectifying any missteps.

rdtwo2• 4 years ago

Come back to twitter work to rule while everyone else runs around freaking out? What are they going to do? Fire you again?

n4bz0r• 4 years ago

Apparently, I seem to be grossly out of touch with all this twitter-related drama. Can someone please explain why the events surrounding twitter acquisition are such a newsmaker?

What does it matter who owns the company and who the company fires? You can still (re)post the messages, you can still read the messages. All the favorite 'content-generators' are still there. Not much has changed from the users' perspective, everything works just fine.

I mean. A few memes - why not? A casual discussion - maybe. Rage and daily news titles about some internal decisions - what is this, '16 and pregnant'?

And what about this 'looking for twitter alternatives' crap? What for?

I feel like these low-effort topics pull the worst out of the community.

palata2• 4 years ago

And what about this 'looking for twitter alternatives' crap?

Well every opportunity is good to try to promote your network, isn't it?

hagbarth• 4 years ago

It was pretty obvious from the speed of the layoffs that this would happen. No way they would be able to accurately suss out everyone that would be needed in a few days. They prioritised speed over accuracy, which I can actually respect. Question is how hard it's going to bite them.

buzzdenver• 4 years ago

So they hastily, after one week, laid off 50% of their staff, but it took just one weekend to realize that some of those people are needed? I guess they were really missed at Twitter, but this is not exactly the sign of a well run company.

luxcem2• 4 years ago

Hopefully all the shit show will lead to the fast decline of Twitter, maybe a new interest in decentralized social media.

jrochkind14• 4 years ago

Does this seem a surprising mis-step for a guy who has run multiple companies before, even succesful ones? Or I guess maybe this is actually pretty typical, you can't lay off that much of your company without making some big mistakes you try to reverse? (But still... this isn't Musk's first rodeo, right? Why does it seem like he doens't know what he's doing?)

thrillgore• 4 years ago

What I like about this is that Elon apparently made this call by counting SLOCs printed on paper, and then stack ranked them. Clearly the man is a genius, and he will save Twitter.

You cannot audit performance at a software company by SLOC. In fact, its a great way to drive up hardware costs and salaries.

I stand by my previous statement about stack ranking: It does not fucking work. EVER. Fire low performers if you must but don't turn them on each other.

Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers to Please Come Back

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