Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/musk-s-first-email-to-twitter-staff-ends-remote-work

by mfiguiere • 4 years ago

766 1341 4 years ago

This is a great way to drive away your best talent and ensure those who stay are more tired, frustrated, and stressed.

It also leads to more mistakes and cutting corners (usually hidden), so in the long term as they accumulate this will bite him in the ass when a particularly bad one gets out in the wild unnoticed. And I thought this guy had a high IQ, clearly he's not that bright after all.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

Having a high IQ doesn't make you immune from cockups.

omega32• 4 years ago

Twitter doesn't need "best people" - it's not innovating and hasn't been for a very long time.

crotho• 4 years ago

Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There was a recent telling interview by someone who used to work there who thought it wouldn't be long until the whole thing collapses on its own because there were huge teams dedicated to simply keeping the thing running.

watwut7• 4 years ago

"Innovating" is not the only nor primary thing that requires "best people".

mrguyorama6• 4 years ago

Yeah but if they want to do anything more than struggle to fight fires 24/7 they need at least average people, and management that trusts them, and buy in for the work needed to make a robust system.

neaden4• 4 years ago

Well it's currently operating at a loss, so if they don't innovate somehow the company is doomed.

_fat_santa2• 4 years ago

It's fun to read about this stuff in the news and comment on it here and on Twitter but the reality couldn't be more different. If you're qualified enough to be in the running to work at Twitter, you likely have many options available to you (employment wise). None of those people are trying to go work at Twitter because there's just too much BS flying around over there.

If this keeps up the only way Twitter is going to be able to attract talent IMO is by offering massive comp packages, because that's the only way you're going to get people that aren't die hard Twitter/Elon Musk fans to want to come there.

thrown_225• 4 years ago

All tech companies have been hiring bottom of the barrel engineers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. This is just a realignment where where knowing how to put the lego pieces together isn't enough any more.

jstx12• 4 years ago

Musk told workers in the email that he wants to see subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue.

Given the direction in which their advertising revenue is going, they might get there.

shapefrog3• 4 years ago

subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue

A lofty ambition indeed. Getting $5billion out of twitter users or an anual subscription of $15 out of 100% of the users sounds like hard work. However, if you drop the avertising revenue to $350 million you can do the WhatsApp $1 a year model.

rdtwo4• 4 years ago

Seems dumb, ads pay more than users

kevingadd4• 4 years ago

Even worse, they're offering reduced ads as a part of their new subscriptions, so every subscription actively decreases ad revenue.

whateveracct• 4 years ago

Lowering the denominator is a fun way to get to half ^_^

whiskey146• 4 years ago

It seems that Musk at this point is completely unaware that he is a walking contradiction.

On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving towards the future.

On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force his employees to work under his total control. He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.

jstx12• 4 years ago

Cutting edge technologist for the investors, old school factory owner for managing people. Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money.

whiskey146• 4 years ago

True, but the fact that technology is going to reinvent everything, including work seems to be an oversight. I'm not sure an old school factory owner is going to attract the best people in a highly skilled industry

shapefrog3• 4 years ago

Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money

Offshoring everything to the third world makes perfect sense to the old school factory owner too.

SturgeonsLaw• 4 years ago

Similar to the formula Bezos is using. They are both making a lot of money doing it, just like the robber barons of the Gilded Age did.

ukoki• 4 years ago

The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.

whiskey146• 4 years ago

So do you think he'll eventually bring back WFH for Tesla and Twitter when they want to increase headcount?

tailspin20192• 4 years ago

The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.

This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0] so interesting.

From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:

"2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"

So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly driving this.

As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in quite the same way when public) and then going public again once this restructuring process has been completed.

[0] https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/

DonsDiscountGas2• 4 years ago

Except that you lose your best people this way, rather than average/worst.

torben-friis• 4 years ago

This is exactly why in my country the law uses the concept of 'acquired rights'.

Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.

watwut7• 4 years ago

he can't force his employees to work under his total control

That is because he actually can force them to be under his control.

He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralized offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralized offices.

I don't think he cares about their lives. Meanwhile, long hours in office have multiple advantages for controlling CEO like Musk. The people are removed from outside influences (friends, family, time to read) and closed in his own echo chamber. Whatever he wants to normalize, it will be harder for them to see is not normal outside of that bubble. It is another variant on what cults, monasteries, armies etc do ... the more they isolate you from outside influences, the better you surrender own agency.

Plus, people not comfortable with above self exclude. It is win win win for ceo. Not necessary effective, but produces strong loyalty and obeisance. Which has advantages also for productivity.

whiskey146• 4 years ago

I get what you’re saying but does that produce the most effective, creative and innovative workforce required to compete in the technology industry?

lakomen• 4 years ago

He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support. That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.

infamouscow• 4 years ago

Do you have anything of substance to add besides ad hominem attacks that don't really even make sense?

Let's break this down:

He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support.

Calling someone a capitalist isn't the dig you think it is, especially on a website run by a VC firm.

Musk has a track record for returning profit to investors.

That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Calling someone the boogeyman convinces nobody. What exactly are you warning about?

He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.

Have you heard of Tesla EVs?

jmeister• 4 years ago

What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?

wolrah• 4 years ago

What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?

Well, it's his (and your) right to be wrong but that's a belief that was already on very shaky ground before 2020 and has by this point been absolutely proven wrong.

Unless your job actually requires physical interaction with or proximity to a thing or other people it can almost certainly be done equally well remotely.

Processes may have to be adjusted to account for remote workers and even the way people work when working remotely, but almost 100% of jobs that take place at a desk in front of a computer can and should be allowed to be remote.

The biggest thing that doesn't work in a remote environment is micromanagement, so bad bosses who feel the need to micromanage hate it, but those people are terrible so if they don't like it that's a good thing.

lithos• 4 years ago

Why are you surprised? He wants employees in space and on Mars where he'll have even greater control (when employees start/leave employment, all information in/out of their station, the amount of mass employees will own, and even control when authorities are allowed on the station if at all).

yummybear• 4 years ago

At this point why would anyone want to stay at twitter? The mood must be absolutely abysmal.

shapefrog3• 4 years ago

Over summer, tech companies were offering wheelbarrows full of cash to potential employees. Love him or hate him, once he started f'ing around at twitter, why would anyone have stayed?

Unless you really desperately wanted to be in the presence of the man himself, and maybe thought he was going to buy you a horse in exchange for something

rdtwo4• 4 years ago

Probably because the people getting let go aren’t in high demand anywhere with current tech layoffs

bawolff2• 4 years ago

Probably it takes more than a week to find a new job and people like to have the new job in hand before quiting the old one.

pastor_bob• 4 years ago

Layoffs started over the summer. Hiring freezes had been implemented.

I'm sure many twitter employees thought he would drag his feet or the deal would fall through, and they'd have at least a year+ of time before he comes in.

ajkjk3• 4 years ago

Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that. On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone come in and clean house / shake things up would be very exciting.

e403• 4 years ago

The podcast Hard Fork interviewed (with disguised voices) 2 current twitter employees (both had been there a long time). The GP is right, it's a terrible environment.

d35007• 4 years ago

How many are left? /s

acomjean• 4 years ago

I survived two rounds of layoffs before I jumped ship. The work environment was just wasn’t pleasant after the first round.

Actually I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d be happy people got let go. (Even I felt kinda bad when “annoying talk politics everyday real loud for at least 30 minutes while everyone is working hard guy” got let go)..

teg4n_• 4 years ago

Unless Musk is giving existing workers a ton of ISOs I don’t see why they should care at all how Twitter does at this point. A worker being excited about a shakeup entailing significantly less freedom, and significantly more work, stress and instability has got to have a bad case of brain worms.

reducesuffering• 4 years ago

Blind has a sentiment analysis called 'Pulse' where verified employees answer survey Q's about their company. Employee morale has driven off a cliff.

PuppyTailWags2• 4 years ago

Layoffs are always morale-killers. Twitter isn't particularly special in this regard, and if Twitter found a way to lay off 50% within 3 days to a boost of morale to the remaining workforce that would be finally be the one truly innovative accomplishment its done, lol.

freejazz5• 4 years ago

Yes, I cannot wait for the chance to take my own company's legal liability onto my own shoulders so I can prove how faithful I am to my new leader!!

giantrobot• 4 years ago

Even the biggest Musk fanboy at Twitter isn't immune to the morale hit from a doubling or trebling of their workload because their team was cut in half from layoffs. What consolation is the company "getting back on course" if you've got to work 70+ hour weeks for the next several months. No time off, sleeping at your desk, never seeing family, and certainly no holiday time off. At the end you now work for a Musk company so your compensation will lag the SV mean.

I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels happy. That's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.

jurassic2• 4 years ago

Many technical parts of the company had 80% layoffs last week. The people who quit or quiet quit over this senseless RTO mandate will push the company into an unrecoverable brain drain, if they're not already there.

kypro• 4 years ago

I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective.

I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.

That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.

40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.

aperson_hello• 4 years ago

And the fact that Twitter employees aren't all near an office. If you live in Minneapolis, you're not exactly going to be happy that you have to go into the office (closest one is 6+ hours away in Chicago). It's not even a choice to go into the office or not at that point - it's an ultimatum of move immediately for a job where everything is on fire or be fired!

schnable• 4 years ago

I think the purely remote workers were already axed.

whiskey146• 4 years ago

I'm beginning to think that collective distributed satellite offices is going to be big. Like WeWork but for companies to house their local staff and far less culty. Would help if they had standing desks, folding treadmills, three screens and everything else for a superb dev experience that is a bit of a pain to set up at home.

rdtwo4• 4 years ago

I mean that’s the worst of both worlds. You get to be a remote employee as in you don’t sit with your team but you still have to commute to an office

Spooky23• 4 years ago

The US Gov pioneered this. It didn’t work very well.

hnews_account_12• 4 years ago

That’s called an office dude. Tf you saying?!

DonsDiscountGas2• 4 years ago

IMHO the ideal situation would be for people to work in their own offices, with doors that closed, and short commutes. Easy to work distraction-free alone, easy to have group meetings and random chats.

But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.

ctvo• 4 years ago

But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.

I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.

Firmwarrior3• 4 years ago

I don't know how much commercial real estate costs, but in the region around Twitter's HQ it's about $5-$6k for a 1000 square foot apartment

Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile

aylmao• 4 years ago

Urban planning in large parts of the USA isn't very conducive of this approach, since housing space tends to be quite segregated from office space.

I also can only assume that it plays a role in office real-estate costs too, just like it does on housing costs.

tejohnso2• 4 years ago

easy to have group meetings and random chats.

I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.

And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?

e403• 4 years ago

How long is your commute?

zikduruqe• 4 years ago

I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.

And all the evidence agrees. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-unintended-consequences...

spopejoy• 4 years ago

The fact is, it was only "100% remote" being forced into existence by the pandemic that is allowing us to even have the debate. Outside of tech almost nowhere allowed remote before.

Musk represents the old guard who liked making people suffer these horrible commutes and office environments just to make senior mgmt feel important.

As a result, I think it's important to defend 100% remote as a pro-employee position, and then look to optional onsite as a way to mitigate potential issues such as isolation, young folks with roomates etc.

kibwen2• 4 years ago

I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies.

However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.

GeneralAntilles• 4 years ago

Mind citing that assertion?

knodi123• 4 years ago

citing some evidence for all the people who are calling you out and accusing you of making up these claims against him:

He calls himself a "nano-manager".

source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-pioneer-elon-musk-...

In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.

source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-extreme-...

Elon Musk says remote workers are just pretending to work.

source: https://fortune.com/2022/07/20/elon-musk-remote-work-from-ho...

kodah2• 4 years ago

My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United States then people in the highest markets would get significant drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than the average worker doing the same work over the same period of time.

Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I say it".

asdff4• 4 years ago

It's not like your income is scaled to the housing costs though. I just checked craigslist for Los angeles and Columbus, Ohio. 1 bedroom average in LA is $2000 and change, Columbus its $1000. For a year in the average 1 bedroom, you are only paying $12k more or so for the unit in LA. Other costs are about the same, the same MSRP for consumer goods, about the same grocery bill (certain food is honestly very cheap in LA due to its year round availability), about the same $10 pints of beers and $12 entrees at your typical late 20s and up drinking/eating establishment.

Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.

I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

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.

karaterobot2• 4 years ago

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

aorloff• 4 years ago

If you aren’t mid project surely you already got canned

corytheboyd• 4 years ago

I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.

I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D

trey-jones• 4 years ago

If I could WFS (Work From Shower), man I'd really get some good stuff done! WFT (Work From Toilet) also a good candidate.

serverholic• 4 years ago

I secretly agree with you. I think the ideal situation is to accommodate both sets of needs. Personally I prefer 100% remote but if someone wants hybrid then that's fine too.

I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate because I acknowledge that executives really would like everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself than do that.

macjc• 4 years ago

I know most studies show remote work improves productivity. I have the opposite experience even though I need to take one hour to commute one way. Our office is 80% empty on average. I think this has greatly hurt the interaction between people, increased friction and slowed down project progress. I am sure some people are more efficient at home, but there might be a silent majority, who enjoy doing less work remotely and never voice themselves (or even say the opposite).

BigJ1211• 4 years ago

In most places it seems to be the opposite from what I gather from my clients. Small majority of people prefer to go into the office. Especially those with kids. And they are vocal about it.

I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home. However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.

FredPret3• 4 years ago

Anything more than 0% office implies a huge sea change from 0%.

To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.

At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.

pcurve• 4 years ago

Rest of the world has largely gone back to office to work now, even if it is part time.

I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.

For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.

My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.

sunsunsunsun• 4 years ago

The problem with hybrid is you're still bound geographically. My work insists on being hybrid (my job has no reason for me to be in the office) and it increases my cost of living by at least 50%, not to mention I'll never be able to be a home owner.

ChristianGeek• 4 years ago

I’m definitely at the point where I’m getting less productive from home, but the question is when is that drop in productivity offset by the time wasted commuting? If my office was just down the street I’d be there every day.

lm28469• 4 years ago

I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective

Even if productivity was down at home vs at the office aren't we already way too productive anyways ?

Living in the office would also be more productive, and working 10 hours per day, banning weekends, &c.

At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're here to grind for 45 years to pay the lifestyle of eccentrics like Musk or to live life ? If it's ok to lose 10% of productivity while regaining hours of your life ?

rockbandit• 4 years ago

This comment really strikes a chord with me. Some days, I’m way more productive, others not so much.

What I do love is eliminating the commute time. That is time I’ve been able to utilize in other ways that really contribute to my mental well being.

Walking the kids to school (instead of driving), walking the dog, exercise, catch up on chores or errands, etc.

That is probably my favorite aspect of working from home.

I do miss those serendipitous interactions with coworkers. And Zoom fatigue is real. (I’m just waiting for the day when Zoom alerts your manager that the Zoom window is not the active window on your machine)

tejohnso2• 4 years ago

Zoom fatigue is real

Wouldn't you experience in-person meeting fatigue sooner than zoom fatigue? What is it about sitting in the comfort of your own home having a conversation that is worse than sitting in an office having a conversation?

evbogue• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/CN49N

manuelabeledo• 4 years ago

Lay off a sizable chunk of your workforce, and then make a sizable chunk of those who kept their jobs miserable.

Genius /s

vagab0nd• 4 years ago

Or quit voluntarily.

BryantD• 4 years ago

As Musk and Calacanis discussed between themselves: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-mes...

kridsdale22• 4 years ago

Ensures that only the most hardcore mascohists remain, who you can abuse for huge productivity extraction vs the rest-and-vest type.

jahlove• 4 years ago

Hacker News top search result for "Twitter", from two years ago:

Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647

Forever is a long time...

zeroonetwothree4• 4 years ago

At the time people thought the pandemic would be forever…

bigbillheck2• 4 years ago

It's still killing hundreds of people every day.

kridsdale22• 4 years ago

Depending on your definitions, it is.

TimTheTinker• 4 years ago

Reminder that "forever", "unlimited", "never", "always", and other superlatives, when spoken by companies, only mean the limit is not yet known, not yet coherently defined, or that the definition is provided elsewhere.

wilg• 4 years ago

This is true even when not spoken by companies.

phaedrus• 4 years ago

Illustrates a case where even workers who have a good relationship with their management might benefit from a union. Management can change; then who is left to hold the new management to former promises?

randomguy02• 4 years ago

The one-sidedness of the comments in this thread surprise me.

If you want to work remotely, don’t work at Twitter.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it’s more beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people to work towards those goals.

Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To give my opinion, if I ran a business that I was trying to grow or trying to meet lofty goals, I’d probably have people in the office too. However, I see upsides to working from home too.

I’ve been working remotely since the beginning of COVID and currently work 2,000 miles away from my work.

aaomidi• 4 years ago

It’s fair to critique someone who just upended the lives of all these people.

ajkjk3• 4 years ago

Yeah, but most of the posts here aren't really critique, they're just sarcastic scorn. We get it, HN, you like remote work a lot and can't imagine any alternative.

randomguy02• 4 years ago

I’m not sure if I’m comfortable judging the “fairness of critiquing”, but it’s a business under new ownership. Changes are going to happen.

bink2• 4 years ago

It's fine for new management to have new business philosophies and want to implement them. But the way they are implemented matters as well.

sixstringtheory7• 4 years ago

In an all-else-being-equal world, yes I can see the tradeoffs.

The problem is that Elon has already destroyed the trust that should’ve existed between him and his newfound employees. It shouldn’t be surprising that in such a relationship any managerial decisions are viewed with extreme skepticism towards their motivation.

Not to mention all of the text messages we’ve already seen that already explain the motivation behind this move. Those were just one of the things that destroyed the trust.

cmeacham982• 4 years ago

Taking the benefit away from employees currently exercising it (with zero grace period) is a little different than someone joining a company knowing they don't do remote work from the start.

I'm not saying it makes Elon Musk a bad person (I think he's a bad person for plenty of other reasons), but I do think it's a poorly thought out move on his part that will cause some of the better employees that survived the layoffs to quit.

arrrg• 4 years ago

It is my understanding that Twitter has been extremely friendly towards remote work.

Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman cruelty without empathy. I’m not even taking any kind of legal perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to employee’s lives can be enormous.

I’m so happy to live in a country where this would be quite illegal to do.

kcplate3• 4 years ago

I love working remotely, I definitely feel like I am more productive and pretty much all of my colleagues feel the same way. Perhaps individually, we all are more productive. However, that said…as a team we are simply not as productive as we were prior to the pandemic. No one wants to acknowledge it, but it’s true. I suspect we are not the only ones.

At some point someone in a decision making role is going to see it too, and at that time we will all be disappointed.

jimmypoop• 4 years ago

What are the chances that Musk composed and sent this email while working remotely? Very high I reckon.

fortuna867• 4 years ago

100%. Rules are for other people.

Andrew_nenakhov4• 4 years ago

You can't expect getting paid and set the rules. If you don't like it, stop receiving pay, that allowes you to ignore the rules. It's fair.

mirekrusin3• 4 years ago

Same rule, he explicitly stated remote work is allowed if approved (by him).

burkaman2• 4 years ago

Related, what are the odds that Musk would be cool with any Twitter employee taking multiple other full-time jobs at the same time?

avbanks• 4 years ago

I never actually thought about this but you make a good point.

DrBenCarson2• 4 years ago

I mean he seems totally fine with it, Tesla engineers are working at Twitter at Tesla investors' expense.

gunapologist992• 4 years ago

He is simply doing what he believes is in the shareholders' best interests.

If you bought a company, especially a failing company, it wouldn't be business as usual: you would immediately set policies that make the most sense for your shareholders and increase profits.

And, Musk has a reputation to be a very hard 24x7 worker but also one not bound by a timezone, let alone geographic location, but again it's a lot easier for him to note dedication etc based on who actually shows up to work. This might be an undeserved reputation, but he is clearly "on" texting and tweeting at all hours day-and-night, and he's running multiple successful companies simultaneously, so either he's awesome at delegation or he's working very hard (or both).

(of course, he has other shareholders, but he is clearly the majority shareholder and the one who is completely in control of the board, and thus has the greatest legal responsibility to keep twitter solvent and return value to himself and the other investors.)

kodah2• 4 years ago

Executives at tech companies tend to live very different lives from the people doing the work. Exceptionalism is typically baked into their understanding of the world.

kleiba3• 4 years ago

"Quod licet iovi non licet bovi."

memish8• 4 years ago

That's not the gotcha you think it is.

d233• 4 years ago

It checks out as a great gotcha to me.

hnews_account_12• 4 years ago

CEO is not in office because he needs to conduct business. The fucking TRAVESTY!!

seaman19212• 4 years ago

so ?

cosmiccatnap• 4 years ago

Strangely enough I think this is the first objectively bad decision he has made since owning Twitter. The others are questionable for sure but this is a good way to lose your best engineers to companies that will respect them.

izzydata• 4 years ago

I think blindly firing employees with low code counts is an objectively bad decision that ignores a lot of nuance and likely lost a lot of great engineers to companies that will respect them.

e403• 4 years ago

The idea that all lines of code are equal (in difficulty) is so absurd as to (in my memory) have been never discussed on HN before. Everyone here knows it. How could Elon not?

the_doctah4• 4 years ago

Is there any evidence that people were fired based on LoC?

bitcharmer• 4 years ago

I've heard this before but never backed by any reputable source.

Mind sharing where you got that from?

murphyslab• 4 years ago

“over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.”

Is this goodbye to @ElonJet?

Also, "troll" seems rather nebulous. Is it the end for anyone seen as a troublemaker?

ssnistfajen4• 4 years ago

I don't think the intention is to suspend ElonJet since Musk has already explicitly said he made the choice to not suspend it despite the alleged "personal safety risk". Trolls in this case probably refers to accounts that paid for new Twitter Blue and are now impersonating well-known figures/entities.

The wording seems consistent with everything going on at Twitter so far, that he's just kinda winging it while everyone else is frozen in confusion over the abrupt changes. A $44B acquisition is quickly reverting into the volatility of a 2006 startup.

wordsarelies2• 4 years ago

Surprise! That's when he last ran a software company.

freejazz5• 4 years ago

"Trolls in this case probably refers to accounts that paid for new Twitter Blue and are now impersonating well-known figures/entities."

Do you mean parody accounts?

jsbg• 4 years ago

Is this goodbye to @ElonJet?

No. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

coffeeblack10• 4 years ago

No. And Musk already said so. What’s the intention of the FUD?

TulliusCicero5• 4 years ago

And Musk already said so.

You think this matters? Did you not see the whole "comedy is legal again" followed by banning/suspending people for parodies? How quickly he went back on "free speech"?

mrobins• 4 years ago

Surely this is partially a calculated move to further reduce headcount/expenses.

UncleOxidant2• 4 years ago

It probably is, but it's kind of risky if you end up pissing off employees who are key to your operations and top performers. Those folks can easily find work elsewhere. You end up with the people who can't easily move elsewhere.

mirekrusin3• 4 years ago

If you are key top performer, surely you can get approval to work remotely, no?

boatsie3• 4 years ago

Many other companies are laying off now, and FAANG is in a hiring freeze. Sellers market right now for employment.

greedo6• 4 years ago

Does Musk value developers? Considering his "code review" the first week, and how poorly FSD at Tesla functions, (I know it's an extremely difficult, if not insurmountable problem) I think he has a very simplistic idea of how to both evaluate and motivate developers.

Arainach• 4 years ago

At this point we have enough evidence to conclude that absolutely nothing Musk does is a "calculated move". If this drives people to quit it's merely a fringe benefit (benefit strictly from Musk's perspective) - this is his normal impulsive micromanaging controlling self.

viraptor3• 4 years ago

Unlikely. A more calculated move would be to first remove remote work, then reduce headcount to the level you want. The other way not only are they paying larger severance, but also aren't sure what number of people they end up with and what teams will disappear completely.

thih9• 4 years ago

This can’t not result in some hidden maintenance or security problems.

Half of the people left and the other half has been told to brace for difficult times, it doesn’t sound like good conditions for smooth continuous operation.

manjose2018• 4 years ago

Whatsapp had 1B users with far fewer eng, why is Twitter so big?

Here is my back of the envelope math of how big I think the company should be for their main offering. Over the past years Twitter has acquired a ton of companies, but I'm going to leave them out of this equation.

Eng (250)

===========

Backend/Storage: 100 eng

Subscriptions: 50

Front-End: 50 eng

iOS App: 20 eng

Android App: 20 eng

UX: 10

Abuse/Moderation (200) ========================= Abuse: 100 Moderation: 100

Marketing/Sales (210)

=======================

PR/Marketing: 30

Ad Sales: 180

Mgmt/overhead (40)

=====================

Legal/GDPR/compliance: 20

HR/Recruiting : 10

CEO/CFO/etc.: 10

What do you think? How far off am I? If more people turn to subscriptions perhaps the abuse/moderation team will shrink in the future.

ssnistfajen4• 4 years ago

Twitter isn't the same product(s) as Whatsapp. That difference is noticeable within 1 minute of opening both applications.

mrweasel2• 4 years ago

Yes, WhatsApp seem more complex.

In all seriousness, I think many of us are falling into the trap that the PayPal guy fell into. Twitter isn't just the app and the website. So it's much harder to run and maintain than it seems like from the outside. If it was just the Tweets, why would they ever need more than 10 iOS developers for instance?

If we cut Twitter into what it is on the surface, and perhaps lose some data retention, then sliming down the engineering organization significantly should be possible with the right people. Not to 50, that's really low for a platform the size of Twitter. That being said: 7500 employees is also way to many for what they do, or at least for how little money they make.

dist1ll• 4 years ago

You forgot operations, tooling, observability, SRE, incidence response, etc

cromka• 4 years ago

The picture isn't complete unless you also compare it with Toyota.

DrBenCarson2• 4 years ago

On WhatsApp, your "post" can be seen by everyone you've exchanged phone numbers with. On Twitter, your "post" can be seen by the entire world.

layer8• 4 years ago

With 5000 to 10000 tweets being sent per second (~500 million per day), 200 employees for abuse/moderation seems low.

TylerE2• 4 years ago

You really think a total of 200 moderators could come even close?

Thats 1.7M tweets a day per moderator. A bit over 3500 per minute.

And thats assuming they work 7 days a week, never get sick, never take vacation.

davidguetta• 4 years ago

Most of moderation is typically outsourced so it doesnt countin this list

myroon5• 4 years ago

Related tech staffing thoughts of someone now directly involved:

https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-saas-org-chart

phillipcarter• 4 years ago

I wonder if the author would change this post to show less employees and higher ARR. That's certainly been my experience today.

mkl95• 4 years ago

Twitter's business model is a clusterfuck. Whatsapp's isn't.

boredtofears6• 4 years ago

I have to admit if I was an executive and I watched one of those "day in the life of" tiktoks from twitter employees that show them spending maybe 20% of their day doing work and the other 80% enjoying company amenities I might be considering tightening things up as well.

adwn• 4 years ago

That video was recorded while being at the office. If anything, it's evidence against the supposed effectiveness of forbidding remote work.

boredtofears6• 4 years ago

Right. I mean, bringing back everyone to the office would just be a part of the tightening, which is quite obviously happening with Musk's reign.

the_doctah4• 4 years ago

Not every office is a daycare for Gen Z complete with wine on tap. SV workers are spoiled.

kevingadd4• 4 years ago

'20% of the day doing work and 80% enjoying company amenities' is ridiculous hyperbole. even if a hypothetical employee is doing that, putting them in the office clearly isn't enough to fix it since they supposedly put a tiktok video up saying 'i don't do my job' and they weren't fired

boredtofears6• 4 years ago

It's not hyperbole, unless whoever was recording was being hyperbolic. It's not exactly hard to find the videos I'm talking about.

Phelinofist• 4 years ago

Link to video for anyone who didn't see it yet (like me): https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512

JakeTheAndroid4• 4 years ago

Wait, so you have an employee that can get all their work done using 20% of their working hours and then spend the rest of their day ensuring they don't burn out and you want to become adversarial to that employee?

Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate issue from the video itself.

It's like that quote from The Office where Michael says Jim is a lazy worker because it takes Jim 20 minutes to complete a project that would take Michael hours to complete. Seems like you're saying you want your least efficient employees and can't be bothered to understand the working habits of your most efficient employees.

Or maybe, just maybe, using time as a sole metric isn't the best way to evaluate employee effectiveness or efficiency.

boredtofears6• 4 years ago

You're missing several other options:

B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are therefore meaningless.

C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.

My hunch is that its a combination of these two.

I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.

tomjakubowski• 4 years ago

Why would you assume that a video posted to social media is at all representative of someone's work day? The actual work is usually really dull.

insane_dreamer3• 4 years ago

The job climate is such, with lots of SV layoffs, that this requirement will probably work now where it wouldn't have worked six months ago (engs would have jumped from Twitter to another SV co)

slantedview2• 4 years ago

A lot of Twitter employees live nowhere near SV, or even an office. The only way to interpret this is that Musk either wants to force more people to leave, or doesn't realize that they're going to leave as a result of this move.

the_doctah4• 4 years ago

Absolutely. My employer weaponized the job market to force RTO in the same way. They were visibly terrified to force RTO when the market was hot.

wordsarelies2• 4 years ago

This kinda thing is great for the "remote work at all hours" is the erzats demon keeping software companies alive. If it is, we'll likely see some downtime, lots of typical E company results (burned out software folks, higher turnover than is industry standard, and much lower pay since Elon doesn't negotiate at silicon valley salary expectations at any of his companies...

If in 2 years Twitter isn't significantly smaller (think 1500 people) and significantly cheaper to run I'd be surprised.

If in 2 years twitter isn't the worst place to work in the valley I'd also be surprised.

slantedview2• 4 years ago

Also, if in 2 years, Twitter's revenue isn't a fraction of what it was just before the Musk takeover, I'd be surprised.

voxl2• 4 years ago

Twitter is going to not exist in 2 years. The financials make no sense, and we already have influencers making fun of subscribers. Subscribing is not only going to create a dichotomy that drives away "economy-of-scale" users but it's going to quickly gain a reputation of being "lame."

dusing2• 4 years ago

Care to wager?

jimt1234• 4 years ago

If, in 1 year (or less), Twitter headquarters isn't moved to Texas, I'd be surprised.

csmpltn3• 4 years ago

Here's a cool and perhaps unforeseen hypothetical turn-of-events: 100% of Twitter's staff give their resignation letter on Friday, and don't show up to work. Leadership wakes up to a collapsing platform, a 44 billion USD bill to pay, with no one to keep the lights on or answer the PagerDuty alerts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?

No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team members". You just wake up to learn everybody left and you're left with nothing.

kleiba3• 4 years ago

Friday afternoon: 100% of Twitter's staff are competing with each other to find a new job.

loloquwowndueo• 4 years ago

Competing with 11k people fired from Meta. FTFY

jreese• 4 years ago

... and everyone laid off from Meta this week ...

csmpltn3• 4 years ago

Half of them were already fired (more will probably follow), and the rest will be messed with for months (if not years) to come (as is evident by the email being discussed here). Having nothing to lose...

grumple• 4 years ago

370k software engineer jobs listed on linkedin right now. So each person laid off from these companies gets to choose between 10 open roles at other companies. And that's just what's listed on linkedin; most jobs aren't.

UncleOxidant2• 4 years ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prices

Prizes. Win stupid prizes.

csmpltn3• 4 years ago

You got it, chief.

coffeeblack10• 4 years ago

You stay home then. I’d go (if I worked at Tw).

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

Sounds like something i would love to do. Musk, the peepole farmer, would be in for a treat. But those who wish to fill in their social voids with onsite work wouldn't be game.

unwind• 4 years ago

Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?

I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications.

Just a thought, I don't really have an opinion here, Twitter is pretty "meh" in my view. I of course hope it ends well for the employees!

Edit: spelling, and fix weird final double bang.

yazaddaruvala• 4 years ago

Most states in the US are "At will employment".

You can quit on the day! It is just not considered "polite" / "professional".

eep_social• 4 years ago

No. Off the top of my head, my understanding is that the vast majority of full time jobs in the US are at-will employment which means there is no required notice period. It’s considered a best practice to give two weeks or more but that’s a social contract and not enforceable in any way. In the past, when employee reference checks were a real thing, that two weeks might buy you a better reference, but even that has been stripped away now with references handled by HR and only confirming dates of employment and conditions of termination (this is to avoid lawsuits I think).

neaden4• 4 years ago

According to this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo... a twitter lawyer has told employees that their contracts specify they are a remote first workplace, so it's unclear if Elon has the actual right to force anyone to return to the office.

mk_stjames• 4 years ago

California is an 'at-will' work state, which means you can both be fired at-will or you can leave a company at-will with zero notice (it goes both ways). I know, because I've done it (left, that is, with only notice given the day-of). Unless this has changed in the years since I've left CA/the US.

TulliusCicero5• 4 years ago

No, you can generally just quit instantly if you want to. Companies can also fire you instantly (but mass layoffs do have some rules).

There's a general convention of giving two weeks' notice, but it's not a legal requirement.

slekker• 4 years ago

Even if you can't really quit, you can just pretend to work, or "silent quit"

umanwizard• 4 years ago

Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?

No. The vast majority of tech jobs are “at-will” on both sides: either party can terminate the relationship at any moment.

Giving two weeks’ notice is a cultural norm.

thrown_225• 4 years ago

If only software devs had setup a union or something.

No, we're too privileged to be fired:

https://ma.nu/blog/not-going-anywhere

Oops: https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter

cwilkes• 4 years ago

Musk: “revenue per employee (1 remaining) has gone through the roof!”

vooner• 4 years ago

Born with an emerald spoon in his mouth, it's no surprise that Musk has no empathy with the common worker.

On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.

philistine• 4 years ago

Let's not mince words, and talk about his real world lived experience: he treats people like apartheid-era South Africa.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

Ah yes. Little is known about apartheid-era SA but the one thing we all know is that when you were fired, they paid you for 2 months and provided healthcare.

cr4nberry• 4 years ago

why would anyone want to work for this asshole? It's not like the employees are well paid compared to other companies. If I wanted to get fisted, I'd just go to amazon and get a bigger check for it

boatsie3• 4 years ago

Except Amazon is in a hiring freeze. Musk knows now is the time to make “unreasonable” demands.

kleiba3• 4 years ago

Prior to Musk’s arrival, Twitter had established a permanent work-from-anywhere arrangement for its workers

...for some definition of the word "permanent".

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Updated to "work-from-anywhere in the building" now. With half of the staff gone you can claim any empty desk or office in sight, I hear the CISO and chief compliance officer's spots are open!

aeyes• 4 years ago

Did you sign a new contract making your work location "remote"? If not then it was never going to be permanent.

ghaff2• 4 years ago

In the US at least, even if you're categorized as remote, the company can almost certainly pull you back to an office and fire you if you won’t. It probably wouldn't be considered as "for cause" (IANAL) but a company can pretty much unilaterally change work conditions, responsibilities, etc. so long as no labor laws are violated.

bogota6• 4 years ago

Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in another place or made life decisions based on this policy which is likely a lot of people. This is really showing that you don’t respect or care about your employees which is par for the course for musk. However i think what he is forgetting is that Twitter isn’t some amazing challenge to solve like self driving or rockets. I think you will see a very understaffed twitter in the future.

Firmwarrior3• 4 years ago

Man, that's an interesting point

I could imagine putting up with a lot of shit from Elon if I believed I was building a better future for humanity in the process, but it's hard to see how a social network is accomplishing that

literalAardvark• 4 years ago

Debatable. "The town square for the world" is a lofty enough goal.

refurb2• 4 years ago

You'd have to be aware of the risks of buying a house somewhere far from the office.

Nothing says the company can't change their mind.

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in another place or made life decisions based on this policy which is likely a lot of people.

I don't. The usual recommendation for buying a house is if you're going to stay there for 5+ years. Job hopping in the valley every 3 years is pretty common. Committing to the remote work lifestyle with an expensive home when it's not clear how long WFH will be an option is a risky move.

coffeeblack10• 4 years ago

Remote work is about the only thing where I very much disagree with Musk. I get it for engineering physical things. But not for web software. In that area, remote works much better than in-office, at least for me.

erulabs• 4 years ago

I agree, but I think either full on-site or fully remote are both leagues better than partially remote. Partially remote is far worse than either - because now all the in-person tactics exclude the remote folks, and all the remote work tactics are an unnecessary burden to the in-office folks. An all-remote team of heads-down engineers is 99% as good as in-person, if not better, because now all the communication has been written down and recorded.

chrisco255• 4 years ago

Nevermind that in a partial remote scenario, like anywhere from 20-80% of the staff are wfh on any given day.

ben_w4• 4 years ago

Ironically, the Tesla robots would (with a VR headset) enable physical-thing workers to work remotely.

coffeeblack10• 4 years ago

That would be really cool, but probably still a while before that actually works on a large scale. Let alone before the Tesla robot actually works. I am less optimistic about the time it takes to develop it.

esalman• 4 years ago

Twitter is going down. The question is whether it will take Musk down with it.

fundad• 4 years ago

He's been embarrassing himself for a minute already but the answer isn't definitely no.

What I realized is he saw contraction in demand at Tesla and wanted a public pretense to sell some without triggering a panic. He had all the Tesla projections long before his tweet about feeling "super bad" about the economy. This deal turned funny money into feeling like a club promoter.

viraptor3• 4 years ago

What do you mean about selling some? He didn't get anything out for himself by effectively putting them up for Twitter collateral. He's effectively setting them on fire and causing panic.

He'd cause less panic by saying "I need to sell some because I wanted to buy a small country".

elorant4• 4 years ago

Tesla's stock is down 30% the last couple of months. So my guess is it probably will.

dusing2• 4 years ago

While the rest of tech a d the stock market are way up this year!

viraptor3• 4 years ago

The real question is, will it last longer than the lettuce though... https://lettuce.wtf/

sdze2• 4 years ago

I can only hope Elon goes bankrupt. He and his man-child-fans are the most obnoxious people on this planet.

bottlepalm2• 4 years ago

Saying and repeating Twitter is going down doesn't actually make it go down. It's an internet hivemind narrative. I'm looking forward to some actual data.

throw__away7391• 4 years ago

Regardless of the merits of remote/office or what this announcement would mean at a normal company, it sounds like it must be pure chaos at Twitter right now.

mirekrusin3• 4 years ago

Half the chaos, smart.

Tomis022• 4 years ago

Is this a running meme, where whenever people like Musk or Trump do something silly, someone comes along and spins it to something positive and then says "smart"? I've seen this happen several times and I wonder if I'm just out of the loop.

bmitc4• 4 years ago

I'd imagine it's been chaos ever since Musk started this whole deal months ago.

jdcaron• 4 years ago

This guy is a car salesman, no wonder he wants to force an in office working policy.

madrox• 4 years ago

I see we're still deep in the "fuck around" stage and have yet to reach "find out."

marcosdumay2• 4 years ago

It's good that he is throwing every known bad practice that managers keep practicing on it to ensure he will find out the correct result.

But he has mixed so many stupid bullshit at this point that I expect people to refuse to learn any lesson from it, always blaming the problem at some different action.

quotemstr• 4 years ago

What if the allegedly bad result doesn't ensue?

bombcar• 4 years ago

Keep prophesying that it will or quietly drop it is the usual method.

the_doctah4• 4 years ago

This will all be memory holed and never spoken of again

memish8• 4 years ago

What you find out is in proportion to how much you fuck around. You have to fuck around to innovate and do new shit. It took a lot of fucking at Tesla and SpaceX to get to where they are.

matthewmcg2• 4 years ago

Fuck around and find out.....about Kessler syndrome?

(I am being glib, but this is potentially a real problem, see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-starlink-...)

r0m4n0• 4 years ago

They fucked around when they were a startup. It’s not often we get to see the fuck around at this level. It’s his and he can do as he pleases which makes this more entertaining than anything I’ve ever witnessed

arez• 4 years ago

that's the same steps to fuck it up btw

cbtacy2• 4 years ago

Enron....

advisedwang• 4 years ago

Levereged buyouts, charging for features that were free, mass layoffs, strict workplace policies are hardly innovation. They're tried and tested standard boring-ass Jack Welch business practices.

newfonewhodis• 4 years ago

I like how some people equate "innovate" with "break the law and make other people pay".

voxl2• 4 years ago

The cult of personality never ceases to amaze me.

pvg• 4 years ago

Omit internet tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

benlivengood• 4 years ago

Amusing that as CEO/Owner of >1 company there's no way for Musk to "work in the office". Will he fire himself?

rgovostes• 4 years ago

over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.

Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants to voice their thought, nothing of value was lost.

Balgair3• 4 years ago

Not a bad idea, but, like, Elon's just gonna change his mind again by next week.

geoffeg• 4 years ago

"We've dispatched a Tesla Model 3 to your current browser's location. To verify you are not a robot you must drive it for one hour and achieve a better Safety Score than the built-in autopilot is capable of achieving."

Matheus28• 4 years ago

Captcha solvers charge less than $4 per 1000 solved captchas. It'd likely still be worth it to do that sort of spam.

ballenf• 4 years ago

Hopefully it wouldn't make the well-funded bots more successful.

sergeym• 4 years ago

There is reCAPTCHA version where the visual challenge for users is not required with almost the same accuracy. https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise/docs/choose-ke...

bogota6• 4 years ago

I spent less than a dollar one day to automate solving some stupid government website form that i was scraping data from. I have no experience in that but it was pretty easy and captchas are close to worthless for any bad actor with even half a brain

avian• 4 years ago

some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants

My reaction when I get the fire hydrants/traffic lights/whatever thing is to not bother and close the site. It's not because I can't spare two seconds, but because from past experience I know that whenever I get this it's an unending captcha hell.

It seems that these days the only time you're given a captcha is when some AI somewhere already decided that you're a bad actor and won't let you to the site, no matter how diligently you keep clicking page after pages of challenges.

ThrowawayTestr2• 4 years ago

Do you use a vpn?

gw9811• 4 years ago

This. My attention is worth more than that.

FredPret3• 4 years ago

Right? The reward for identifying all the traffic lights is that you get to identify all the boats, then all the stop signs. Wait, what were you trying to do again?

barneygale• 4 years ago

You're also training google's robots to be more human-like.

awinder2• 4 years ago

You’d need to do this TO the subscribers because the problem he’s trying to address is that now there’s a bunch of fake people with a “verified” status who are running scams on people or polluting news (like Fake Verified Labron James trade news going wild before realizing, wait, it’s a fake).

So then the downside is that you start bouncing people because is a checkmark worth getting captchas? Or maybe you put captchas on everyone so that the experience blows for everyone, and pray it helps?

Or maybe you just don’t conflate paying $8 with being “verified”, unless you’re gonna, yknow, verify something.

bmitc4• 4 years ago

I bet this will be the code:

    bots
    |> List.filter isNotTeslaBot
    |> removeBots

spbaar• 4 years ago

Use the 4chan captchas those are the hardest things ive done since calculus

humanistbot• 4 years ago

There are already clickworker farms that will solve CAPTCHAs as a service. A CAPTCHA once per day would cost next to nothing for a bot farm.

Balgair3• 4 years ago

I think that the NYT article has the much better lede from the emails in it:

Due to resignations by 3 top execs yesterday, engineers are now likely to have to make sure that their code is compliant with the FTC w.r.t. the 2011 judgement against Twitter.

As in, there is a good chance that individual SWEs at Twitter are going to be legally culpable for violations.

Even if I am totally misreading that quick lede about dense legalese (likely), it still says that Twitter currently has no reasonable way to stay in the FTC's good graces for the foreseeable future.

Y'all, don't try to appease a billionaire and get yourself in legal trouble. Don't even try to chance it. Walk away.

fermentation• 4 years ago

How does that work? If a SWE isn't aware of the gazillion laws surrounding their code, why isn't the company liable when X of those laws are inevitably violated?

What about the people who review the code? Or the people who wrote the systems that push the code?

badwolf• 4 years ago

It seems Musk's new legal "department" is wanting developers to self-certify - put their own name on the certification.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...

neuronexmachina• 4 years ago

More info about that: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...

The FTC reached a settlement with Twitter in May after the company was caught using personal user info to target ads. If Twitter doesn’t comply with that agreement, the FTC can issue fines reaching into the billions of dollars, according to the lawyer’s note to employees.
The note goes on to say that its author, who The Verge knows the identity of but is choosing not to disclose, has “heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because ‘Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.’”
Musk’s new legal department is now asking engineers to “self-certify” compliance with FTC rules and other privacy laws, according to the lawyer’s note and another employee familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission.
The employee said this week’s launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription disregarded the company’s normal privacy and security review, with a “red team” reviewing potential risks the night before the launch. “The people normally tasked with this stuff were given little notice, little time, and unreasonable to think it [the privacy review] was comprehensive.” None of the red team’s recommendations were implemented before Twitter Blue’s relaunch, the employee said.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

Asking software engineers to make legal determinations on behalf of the company. What could possibly go wrong?

dragonwriter7• 4 years ago

Due to resignations by 3 top execs yesterday, engineers are now likely to have to make sure that their code is compliant with the FTC w.r.t. the 2011 judgement against Twitter.

I think that’s backwards: the resignations by people responsible for compliance were due (among other issues) to the policy change (which they see as violating the order, which would put them personally at risk) that the process would change to engineer self-certification to support the desired velocity of change, the resignations were not the cause of the change.

Also, Twitter apparently has a sworn compliance report due today to the FTC (14 days from the change of ownership.)

https://twitter.com/Riana_Crypto/status/1590741781666488320?...

kisstheblade• 4 years ago

What happened to Musk's claim "I don't care about the economics at all"? Sure seems to be top priority.

rurp2• 4 years ago

Man, I'm starting to think that you can't take this guy at his word.

p0pcult• 4 years ago

They should all quit, demonstrate who actually holds the power.

thr0wawayf005• 4 years ago

According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive:

That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.

Is that even remotely feasible? Based on the commentary I've seen, Twitter Blue is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to their total revenue.

klodolph• 4 years ago

Revenue of $5bn. Let’s say that you burn half of it down, so you’re making $2.5bn with ads, and $2.5bn with subscriptions. If there 200M DAU, then that means you want to make $12.5/year, per user, for subscriptions.

I don’t see how that would be possible, even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios.

andsoitis• 4 years ago

One area Twitter hasn’t excelled in is adding new users.

inerte• 4 years ago

The good news is that if your revenue drops, so does your share of subscription. In that sense he's already helping the goal by doing the first part!

dragonwriter7• 4 years ago

According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive [...] Is that even remotely feasible?

Yes, Musk can plausibly drive off enough advertisers to get advertising revenue down to parity with subscription revenue.

Don't see how it helps Twitter survive, though.

rbetts• 4 years ago

Q2 revenue was $1.18B on 237.8M mDAU. If they want $590M (50%) in subscription revenue, that's 24.5M subscriptons @ $24 per quarter. So they'd need to convert about 10% of the reported mDAU to subscribers?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-s...

apendleton• 4 years ago

I don't think what he's proposing is to replace any ad revenue -- he's trying to grow revenue and take a company currently in the red into the black. I think he means to keep all the ad revenue, and then add that much again in subscription revenue. So: 20%, I guess? Or even more to make up for advertiser attrition? Which seems like... a ton.

jacquesc2• 4 years ago

I think it could only possibly work if "subscriptions" were not directly to twitter, but to other twitter subscribers. Premium follows to content creators, charities, individual journalists, or politicians. Where you get some "club only" content and interaction. And Twitter takes a piece off the top

rodgerd4• 4 years ago

Just to service the debt that Musk loaded them with as part of the purchase, they're going to have to add a billion a year. They had 5 billion in revenue last year. So that would be three billion a year in subscriptions.

Given that Twitter had about half a billion users hat's six dollars per user in subscriptions to see six dollars worth of surveillance capitalism per year. Does that seem likely?

colinloretz• 4 years ago

not likely, subscriptions are very mature on YouTube and still only make up a tiny percentage of revenue. MKBHD did a good video breaking this down across other social networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c

pigtailgirl• 4 years ago

-- I was more scared of the "upcoming economic downturn" - how bad are people expecting this recession to be? --

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

Some people at Twitter have remote work in their employment contract.

cbtacy2• 4 years ago

And Musk has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no respect for legal contracts.

gist• 4 years ago

A legal contract is only as good as someone's ability to enforce it. Otherwise the idea that it's some kind of a bond and companies or people should or do just 'the right thing' is not unfortunately reality.

I would not say he has any more or less respect for legal contracts than any other 'typical' company or business person (from my experience).

s1artibartfast3• 4 years ago

Those same contracts allow that employees can be let go. It's not really the gotcha people think it is.

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

The couple people I knew with remote work in their contracts actually want to be let go at this point, wasn't saying it was a gotcha — but they'll need to renegotiate or be terminated.

slg3• 4 years ago

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 all teams are properly staffed. Instead, Musk has already laid people off to the point that they are trying to hire back people previously laid off and current employees are sleeping in the office. Now he is pushing even more people out the door with no control over what teams will be hurt the hardest.

boatsie3• 4 years ago

I think you have it backwards. This is how you accomplish a 75% reduction while only having to lay off (and pay severance for) 50%! Musk again playing 4d chess.

warinukraine• 4 years ago

No, you have it backwards. If you wanted 75% reduction while only having to lay off 50%, you make the unpopular decision _first_, and then the lay offs.

gamblor9564• 4 years ago

Forcing people who were told they can work fully remote in their employment agreement to work in the office is treated as a constructive dismissal in the U.S.

As this constructive dismissal is clearly part of the mass layoffs, they would also be subject to the 60 days notice under the WARN Act (or 60 days pay to waive notice).

Taniwha2• 4 years ago

4D chess? he doesn't have the self control, too busy haring off tilting at windmills to launch his damned spaceship

RavingGoat5• 4 years ago

You confusing 4d chess with Candyland.

danans8• 4 years ago

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 somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.

SketchySeaBeast5• 4 years ago

Seems like he's trying to speed run employees jumping ship - I'm surprised he didn't try these tactics for a month or two before firing a bunch of people and paying severance.

pasttense01• 4 years ago

And how do you find "the people carrying the previous culture" and other deadwood?

You have to observe them over several weeks/months. But Elon didn't do this at all. He is about as likely to have fired the best people as the worst people.

slg3• 4 years ago

He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational.

But this is my point. By doing it in this order he is risking continued operation of Twitter because he no longer can ensure Twitter can either properly staff business critical teams or retain critical institutional knowledge for how to run the company. He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.

lovich4• 4 years ago

Making a bunch of unpopular changes and waiting a month still seems more prudent. The people most likely carrying that culture are gonna be the ones most inclined to leave over changes, and if they are leaving on their own that would decrease costs associated with benefits or the increase to the unemployment tax that comes with layoffs

spamizbad• 4 years ago

He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.

Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent by virtue of working on some of the most interesting problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous CEOs?

nitwit005• 4 years ago

Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time.

I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.

ClumsyPilot4• 4 years ago

He has to strip down the car fast

You know what we call a vehicle thats undergoing Rapid Disassembly? An Explosion.

janoc2• 4 years ago

then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.

That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.

Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many people are going to think twice about signing up to work for a company and owner that have a reputation for treating people as disposable trash.

Employees are the company's most valuable capital - so if you unceremoniously boot out the most experienced staff that was keeping the ship afloat and expect to replace them with cheap new hires while maintaining productivity, security and revenue (which weren't great at Twitter to begin with), you would have to be delusional.

Some layoffs were likely justified but thanks to the hamfisted way they were done I am sorry for the recruiters that will have to look for new staff now. They will have a very unenviable job.

0cf8612b2e1e• 4 years ago

He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making

While I think he has done a huge amount to scare away advertisers, I expect the ad industry as a whole is going to be seeing reduced profits for the next couple of years.

dragonwriter7• 4 years ago

He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want

So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.

He wanted a fresh startup to sink $44 billion into, not an existing business with employees he doesn't want, a legacy product that doesn’t fit his vision, and feature iteration velocity constraints from FTC consent decrees that a new startup wouldn’t have.

aerostable_slug2• 4 years ago

both of his own making

Really? I was under the impression that Twitter was hemorrhaging money.

btbuildem• 4 years ago

He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision

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

Zigurd2• 4 years ago

This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..."

It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.

In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.

An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.

rodgerd4• 4 years ago

It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an institution or individual they like, but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a crippling social media addiction and an inability to get over his ex.

cortesoft• 4 years ago

It would make sense not to base your offer price on a weed joke…

cokeandpepsi• 4 years ago

Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021

Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)

Elon: ["emphasized" above]

Elon: Insane potential for improvement

Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>

Jason: Day zero

Jason: Sharpen your blades boys

Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures

Jason: https://twitter.com/jason/status/1515094823337832448?s=1O&t=...

Jason: I mean, the product road map is beyond obviously

Jason: Premium feature abound ... and twitter blue has exactly zero [unknown emoji]

Jason: What committee came up with the list of dog shit features in Blue?!? It's worth paying to turn it off

Elon: Yeah, what an insane piece of shit!

Jason: Maybe we don't talk twitter on twitter OM @

Elon: Was just thinking that haha

toomuchtodo3• 4 years ago

Twitter employees: “we’re going to vote to unionize”

When you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn’t you? It brings the federal government in to provide support, on their dime no less. Worst case is everyone leaves, the NLRB finds against Musk, and he has to give folks their jobs back while Twitter is burning.

“The strongest steel is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”

lbhdc• 4 years ago

What is the source for this conversation?

alexpetralia• 4 years ago

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-t...

Page 20

fred_is_fred• 4 years ago

A long standing maneuver that companies have is the "your job is now in Houston" when you live in New York. This has an interesting side effect of basically removing anyone from your company who is old enough to have a family with kids in school, wife working etc. Basically it "legally" removes the older more expensive employees. RTO will remove people also like you said, but I wonder what demographic?

gamblor9564• 4 years ago

Moving a person's office of employment outside of what would be considered a reasonable commute is treated as a constructive dismissal in the U.S. It is generally legal, because is treated as a normal termination by the employer (basically: the employee's "current" job is being terminated and the employer is offering them a "new" job in a new location).

This means, among other things, that the employee qualifies for unemployment, the employer's unemployment insurance account will get dinged, etc.

jprd2• 4 years ago

COUGH! IBM! COUGH! GE!

mastazi• 4 years ago

At first this was my thinking as well, but then towards the end of the article, the author mentions an "all hands meeting" he had with employees before completing the acquisition, and apparently he said in that occasion that he was against remote work.

Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company.

[1] i.e. almost guaranteed

cmh892• 4 years ago

Getting rid of remote work is an excellent way to chase away your best employees while retaining people with nowhere to go.

Ptchd2• 4 years ago

Maybe in reality, he didn't layoff as many people as he wanted to? The rest will fire themselves...

rchaud6• 4 years ago

why? everyone has PTO, and nobody is required to do all-nighters. If they want to, they can just go on vacation, wait it out and pick up severance when they get the chop.

seydor• 4 years ago

But it s not a neutral decision. It is likely you are left with the employees who are willing to tolerate a worse lifestyle for the paycheck, and you are letting go employees who are smart enough to prefer to have more control of their lives.

chinabot• 4 years ago

I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk to take over.

Musk is his own worst enemy and can be a douche a lot of the time but he doesn't deserve this toxic personal shit for trying to sort out the mess. Also as I remember once he saw past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.

georgyo• 4 years ago

I worked at a place that did this in 2009.

The problem with this method is that many people DID relocate to keep their jobs. And then were layed off two months later.

Imagine uplifting your life for your job, and then being told you need to find a new job anyway.

hsuduebc23• 4 years ago

I'm afraid that you shouldn't subduct to this tyranny in first place.

slg3• 4 years ago

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 people who refuse to work in the office.

And let's be honest, Musk isn't doing it in this order for the wellbeing of Twitter's employees.

jmathai• 4 years ago

Doesn't seem like this is the type of decision tree Elon uses. Parent comment seems more like what I'd expect Elon to optimize for.

shaburn• 4 years ago

2009 was a different time and this is the easiest time to find a new job for the rest of the collapse.

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

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 despite covid they made a profit.

Companies lie to employees all the time.

majormajor• 4 years ago

A more deliberate (some might say sneaky, but I'd prefer it if I was in the situation) move would be to take an extra week or two to have some of your management do some feeling out of who would be 100% opposed to remote so you could include them in the layoff list, but also don't force people to uproot just to be laid off.

But at least you could avoid some of the "unregretted attrition" of people you decided to keep.

(This assumes Musk isn't intentionally sequencing things to limit the "official" size of the layoff while actually wanting to cut a significantly larger percentage.)

1letterunixname2• 4 years ago

Yes. It's never wise to cede anything to pushy jerks like that because they'll just take and take without end. The only answer they respect is "no".

babypuncher2• 4 years ago

The other problem is that these unpopular decisions end up driving away the people who are the most confident about being able to find a new job, leaving you with less-skilled employees who maybe feel less comfortable job hunting.

whacim• 4 years ago

I wonder if there is some sort of tax strategy Musk can implement if Twitter goes under? Might be more valuable dead than alive to him.

dboreham• 4 years ago

The Trump doctrine?

nonrandomstring3• 4 years ago

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.

notacop31337• 4 years ago

I made this comment to a friend recently that I don't think enough people are considering that he might actually be mad enough to have spent $44B to destroy a toxic business.

drcross• 4 years ago

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.

barbazoo• 4 years ago

Is it true that $13bn came in the form of loans and that those loans are secured by Twitter, not Musk or any entity he'd personally be responsible for?

If so, how does that work?

bart_spoon4• 4 years ago

I think his ego is too massive for that. The man bristles at the slightest criticism. Destroying Twitter, even intentionally, will provide enough fodder to his critics that I don't think he'd be able to actually suck it up and follow through.

ericmcer2• 4 years ago

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 ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future of social media does not involve automated moderation and tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn’t a horrible bet.

dnissley• 4 years ago

What's the axe he's grinding?

fortuna867• 4 years ago

Not for the lols, I dont care how rich you are losing 44b hurts. But he is clearly out of his depth.

matthewdgreen• 4 years ago

Musk loves Twitter. You don’t have to point to the billions he spent on it, you can just see that he loves using it. He might want to change it, might destroy it accidentally in the process (like a kid who hugged their beloved pet too hard), but he didn’t set out to destroy it.

type0• 4 years ago

He wants to turn it into Wechat-like platform.

kazinator• 4 years ago

Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be the less productive fraction of the employees.

heavyset_go8• 4 years ago

Changes in terms of employment, like going from WFH to mandatory in-office, makes employees eligible to collect unemployment should they choose to quit. It's one of the few reasons you can collect unemployment after voluntarily quitting.

Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

If you view every employee as interchangeable this makes sense. Clearly that isn't the case.

What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.

exclusiv• 4 years ago

Yes but he may be optimizing for the younger, unmarried with no kids employees he can manage like he wants. Remove remote work and this filters out the types that are less likely to put up with his demands and managerial style, expectations, etc.

blindseer• 4 years ago

You are giving Musk too much credit. He’s a classic control freak and micromanager, and right now he’s trying to run twitter like 6 person start-up that running low on funds.

guywithahat• 4 years ago

To my understanding, he's only laid off teams that he doesn't think are important so far. I know everyone is talking about 50% layoffs, but from what I can see that hasn't actually happened yet, it's only confirmed in the sense that it will happen.

I'm happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see anything saying that, only teams that have been reduced by ~15% and other teams which have hardly been reduced at all

strangescript• 4 years ago

Truth is he probably wanted to eliminate even more staff than he did. It seems like he wants to get the smallest possible team that can keep the core product of twitter running, platform for posting small content blocks.

He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.

ralston3• 4 years ago

This this this. Musk isn't trying to win a popularity contest. He's trying to narrow staff down to that 10% that can do 80% and build back from there. A very cutthroat capitalist approach, but was anyone expecting anything else from the guy who ordered TSLA employees back into factories during covid?

borissk• 4 years ago

No, you're obviously wrong. Firing people first lets one get rid of the underperformes, while announcing the unpopular decisions first gets rid of the overperformers.

mdcds• 4 years ago

Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs?

no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers

version_five• 4 years ago

From a Machiavellian (? I think) perspective, better to do the layoffs first and flood the job market with people before making other unpopular decisions that may drive people away. No idea if that was the plan but it makes sense.

(Even if the number cut doesn't amount to anything market moving, they probably share a lot of the same network, and it will definitely looks like a flood of job seekers in most twitter employees bubbles, and those of their immediate networks)

andrei_says_• 4 years ago

I know I’m stating the very obvious but this and the layoffs feel quite adversarial.

The vibe I get from Musk is that he doesn’t care about much more than the numbers and believes that a hard dictatorship is warranted in this situation.

The sudden one sided decisions backed by ultimatums give me the impression of lack of respect for his employees and downright abuse.

I don’t see how such a relationship can nurture a positive company culture or retain top talent.

Apofis• 4 years ago

The layoffs and departures on their own are by my count possibly getting close to saving the company a billion $USD a year. That's the projected cost of the debt obligations he took on buying the company. EZPZ.

piva002• 4 years ago

That seemed to be the plan since April per chats between Musk and Jason Calacanis [1]:

Day zero
Sharpen your blades boys
2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary departures

[1] https://muskmessages.com/d/34.html

shermozle• 4 years ago

Great plan. Now you got rid of all the people with options and you've kept all the deadweight. Many companies do exactly this with voluntary redundancies!

bursted• 4 years ago

test

arendtio• 4 years ago

Given that the best people might find new jobs faster than the worst, you might drive away the better half of your human resources. With the 'fire-first' approach, you have more control over who should leave (e.g. hiring managers).

I don't like it either, but I think that is part of the rational behind it.

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it anymore.

so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?

happytoexplain2• 4 years ago

"Why shouldn't we go back" doesn't have any more weight than "why shouldn't we stay". The old normal relies on the acceptance of a lot of life-time wasted and a certain amount of misery, and people were increasingly unwilling to accept it. The pandemic simply provided an impetus - that's all.

nimih• 4 years ago

It's possible that a lot of office workers have decided they have good reasons to prefer working from home beyond the highly contagious airborne disease. I know that I personally have, but further research is probably necessary to determine whether this is a widespread trend.

system2• 4 years ago

Most companies already realized remote working doesn't work out. Hard to admit but it is the truth.

watwut7• 4 years ago

so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?

Because we like the new normal.

c9da4a• 4 years ago

Living in a city is unpayable, roads are congested at peak hours, the environmental damage from commuting, etc

spaniard89277• 4 years ago

Ive got covid last friday at my office. Large gathering of people without proper ventilation.

Now my company has to pay me while I'm laying in bed writing this as I'm not capable of doing much useful.

Im not a dev but a technician, I just solve tickets throug a computer. We never were more prodictive not had so much income. What was the point?

I won't sabotage this company but honestly, all companies doing this feel like they play their employees because they can.

If they want to treat me like this, then I don't see why should care about the business and not try to game the system as much as I can.

It's been hard because I have a work ethic, but cmon.

davesque• 4 years ago

Haven't you ever been forced into a situation that turned out to be better in certain ways?

For many people, discovering the quality of life improvements afforded by remote work, that were forced on us by COVID, has been a blessing. Many have reasonably argued that there wasn't much loss in productivity compared with the huge boon in life satisfaction resulting from remote work.

Your comment doesn't respond to the opposing view as though it could be reasonable.

solardev• 4 years ago

Maybe Musk just likes explosions. Rockets, batteries, Twitter...

VLM• 4 years ago

Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.

You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.

Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.

What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.

All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?

Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.

snapcaster• 4 years ago

Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"

what is this statement based on?

alfiedotwtf• 4 years ago

Factory production lines

jmiskovic• 4 years ago

Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?

muro• 4 years ago

I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to pay that well...

steve_taylor• 4 years ago

Because the 1950s is the only decade that’s a villain.

SkyPuncher3• 4 years ago

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?

While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers".

I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.

CrimpCity2• 4 years ago

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?

They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine.

Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.

jansan2• 4 years ago

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?

Bootstrap

antisthenes• 4 years ago

They increased the message size from 140 to 280 characters, allowing people to generate double the outrage with almost the same network load.

kevinventullo• 4 years ago

They launched the predecessor to the current hottest social media app but killed it before it could gain any popularity. So that’s a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.

fdgsdfogijq• 4 years ago

I agree, high performers can actually damage innovation by stopping it. Since they own major systems, they control how and what gets done.

fnordpiglet8• 4 years ago

Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created? I’ve seen no upside to employees offered, only brutal management and benefit reduction with a promise of hard work for less.

hutzlibu• 4 years ago

What does this has to do with Twitter stopping remote, which to me is simply a statement of control freak Elon and nothing else.

propogandist2• 4 years ago

the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.

insane_dreamer3• 4 years ago

You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"

I like remote work too, but there's been plenty of innovation pre-pandemic when we (almost) all had our butt in a seat

lightbendover• 4 years ago

You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"

This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?

croes2• 4 years ago

You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?

Because 3 years ago people thought it wouldn't work. The pandemic showed it does.

karaterobot2• 4 years ago

Reading generously, I would say you could interpret that statement more like: "Now that we know it is possible to innovate with an asynchronous workforce, and most people want to work that way, it will be extremely difficult for us to gather the same quality of individuals in one place to innovate if we decide we need their butts to be in seats."

d233• 4 years ago

That's not a superlative, plenty of people had that opinion before three years ago, and sure, why not, it's a web forum.

braingenious• 4 years ago

Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago.

Isn’t the word “nobody” literally a superlative?

sakopov• 4 years ago

You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"

Seems to me that the majority was innovating just fine this way until pandemic hit.

willcipriano2• 4 years ago

Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals figured out how to game equity compensation with their Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have had some big leaps).

A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.

roughly2• 4 years ago

What fundamentally does twitter do?

Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.

LawTalkingGuy6• 4 years ago

an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi

Could you give me an example from the USA?

your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near]

The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.

Twitter does content moderation.

Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts.

To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.

hsuduebc23• 4 years ago

Nice idea have another 4chan with less gore

coldtea• 4 years ago

Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.

Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.

protastus• 4 years ago

Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.

It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate.

The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.

three_seagrass• 4 years ago

It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient.

Is it though?

Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.

I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.

asdff4• 4 years ago

What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.

The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place.

Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.

Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.

iLoveOncall• 4 years ago

I don't think it's a crazy idea you've got here, but Musk has announced he wants to try a lot of things and keep what works.

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15903849198299627...

That doesn't seem compatible with what you present in your post.

alistairSH2• 4 years ago

So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other billionaires on the other side of the country.

And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason.

What an absolute knob.

Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.

VBprogrammer3• 4 years ago

It's an interesting look from someone claiming to believe that climate change is one of the biggest threats to humanity. Better get those expensive developers working from the office again so they keep buying expensive electric cars...

SQueeeeeL• 4 years ago

Isn't the Hyperloop regularly derided by those in the environmental community for distracting from more useful/environmentally sustainable transit solutions. Tesla also bifurcated the charger ports on the market, which has slowed adoption of EV chargers by businesses. Definitely a more complicated relationship than a surface level analysis would imply

bmitc4• 4 years ago

I saw a stat recently that an electric car removes about as much emissions as a meter of road adds.

Electric cars are the most overblown response to climate change. They will help in a myopic way when comparing directly to combustion cars over several years (electric cars only start to save emissions somewhere between them being driven 6-24 months into their ownership), but I doubt it's much more than that and even possibly a net increase in emissions in terms of furthering the dominance of the car.

Elon Musk doesn't care about anything other than his ego.

MetaWhirledPeas3• 4 years ago

Let's not pretend his goal was to sell more cars; that's ridiculous.

But to your point, he's always seemed to have this philosophy that climate mitigation doesn't have to be a compromise. In his vision of the future we do all the things we do now and more, but we do them better.

ncr100• 4 years ago

Yes and this shows how he is narrowly smart, like all us humans

ideaz• 4 years ago

Maybe in his genius mind thats how he will get them to buy more Teslas.

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

"Sometimes my genius... it's almost frightening."

MetaWhirledPeas3• 4 years ago

I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending. Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a workaholic.

khazhoux• 4 years ago

I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in.

I guess that would depend on whether they'd be getting employee comp/equity, or Elon's comp/equity.

cowpig• 4 years ago

Showing up late to an all-hands meeting of thousands of employees is wasting thousands of hours of peoples' time. I don't care how important you think his time is that's not going to add up to a rational choice

piva002• 4 years ago

You almost make it sound like we're back to aristocracy. He's the fucking CEO, not a Lord over his servants.

ben77993• 4 years ago

It feels like remote work is a distraction here.. it's more like Musk realizes he bought a company that was in a lot more trouble than anyone out in the public can understand and he's scrambling for anything.

Everyone is all worried about what this means for remote work at other companies when it might not mean anything at all since the other companies don't have the same circumstances as Twitter.

Also we're all defensive cause we're attached to remote work.

cragfar• 4 years ago

It's weird how people are trying to divine his actions. He's been against remote work at every point. He tried to keep the Tesla offices open when the Covid Lockdowns were starting.

bmitc4• 4 years ago

I think he's been pretty against anything that doesn't treat workers as automatons.

bink2• 4 years ago

it's more like Musk realizes he bought a company that was in a lot more trouble than anyone out in the public can understand

Or he bought a company and by doing so placed it in a lot more trouble than it was previously.

ben77993• 4 years ago

This seems to be the popular view, everyone has been irrationally cheering for Twitter for 10+ years now but it ignores twitter's long term financial results as we head into an economic contraction.

That's the whole thing.. Musk made his stupid public decision to buy Twitter before the economic winds shifted. By the time it closed things had changed. He harmed Twitter by the way the whole thing dragged out, but Twitter was damaged goods anyway and has become more damaged by the economic winds in addition to Musk.

Twitter was betting the farm that investors would continue to ignore the bottom line and money would continue to be easy and valuations would continue to be decoupled from results.

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

He's done this for his other companies, so it's hard to say if there's any more to the story.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

From the NYT article:

"On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The Times.

The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer. Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.

Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.

"Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/elon-musk-twit...

This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of "free".

Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be commercialised.

Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more fantasy than reality.

shagie2• 4 years ago

Some other context from a WaPo article - https://wapo.st/3ht1DYu

The agency said that it was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and that it was prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with certain privacy and security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse.
Twitter was first put under a consent order in 2011 and it agreed to a new order earlier this year. If the FTC finds Twitter is not complying with that order, it could fine the company hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially damaging the company’s already precarious financial state.
... The new decree required Twitter to start enhanced privacy and security programs, which were to be audited by a third party. Under that decree, Twitter is required to conduct a privacy assessment of any new products it launches.
... The meltdown of the security leadership is especially fraught because an FTC audit was expected by January, according to two people familiar with the schedule. One said that Kissner and other executives had been hiring, despite a company-wide freeze, in a frantic effort to meet compliance rules before then.

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

There is a lot I love about the Elon Twitter saga. Scoping it to this issue (remote work):

1. We all know that "butts in seats" is a form of psychological control. Yes, there can be benefits to physical proximity. For software engineers, there can be benefit for collaboration, team-building and teaching. You can do this remotely but it's more difficult. However, for a lot of jobs however there is absolutely zero benefit to the employee.

2. This should remind people that your relationship with your employer is fundamentally adversarial. Remote work, despite it saving tech companies in particular, a lot of money for office space, onsite perks, equipment and so on, sold it to you as a "benefit". It started out of necessity in the pandemic. More recently it became a compeititve necessary to draw and retain talent in a tight labor market. In an era of mass layoffs in tech that advantage is no longer needed so companies can revert to their natural state of seeking control and not offering benefits they don't have to;

3. Elon is a very old school American (ironic, considering he's South African) boss who very much rules out of fear and for whom loyalty only flows in one direction: up (to him). He is not Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. He's just another annoying, cringey, incredibly privileged fail-son. I'm honestly glad more people are realizing this as this is not the man to deify;

4. Morale among the remaining Twitter staff must be (I would guess) incredibly bad right now. Rather than extending these people an olive branch, the Bataan death march of reshaping Twitter into Musk's soulless image continues without respite, casulaties be damned; and

5. For many this will be there first downturn market as you could easily have been in the workforce for the last 12 years without ever experiencing it. You may have bought into the idea, particularly if you're an engineer or other highly specialized position, bought into the idea that tech companies are different and/or that you aren't expendable or replaceable. None of this is true. Unfortunately, people (Americans in particular) use such rationalizations to argue against any form of labor organization as being unnecessary or that somehow they'll all be dragged down to the "average" by collective bargaining. Such ideas are just highly effective propaganda.

Sorry Tweeps for all you're going through.

elorant4• 4 years ago

According to the email, Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue. Assuming that Twitter’s revenue is around $5bn, and the subscription is at $8/month that’s some 26M subscriptions, or 5,7% of its users. I don’t think that a number so high is achievable, unless they pull a rabbit out of their hat.

datalopers• 4 years ago

You're making the assumption that annualized revenue hasn't already dropped precipitously due to a loss in advertising dollars, and the bar for subscriptions to reach 50% is rapidly lowering.

elorant4• 4 years ago

Even if you cut the conversion at half it's still too high. Realistically speaking, anything above 1% is highly optimistic.

greedo6• 4 years ago

I'm sure he's expecting growth in both ARPU and total users.

fckgw• 4 years ago

How is charging for a website that is currently free going to increase total users? It makes no sense.

sangnoir3• 4 years ago

Another way to achieve Musk's target would be to drop ad revenue numbers precipitously until it is equal to subscriptions - a process that may well be under way.

elorant4• 4 years ago

Sure, but in this case you'd hardly make any profit. Interests on that $13bn loan alone are somewhere around $1bn annually.

muaytimbo• 4 years ago

I would make them fire me, then file for unemployment.

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

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 crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).

2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.

With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.

With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.

hallway_monitor• 4 years ago

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.

eli• 4 years ago

And how's that been going so far?

heyitsguay• 4 years ago

Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor, this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The ship needs to do something new, and this is something new, but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.

pajtl• 4 years ago

Wouldn't the new commander always say the ship is not running smoothly?

happymellon• 4 years ago

The only thing that ever happens on these scenarios, are that the skilled folks who are concerned about losing their jobs will move and Twitter will be left with the dregs who stay because they can't get a new job elsewhere.

ethanbond• 4 years ago

Thank goodness COs can operate entire ships by themselves, otherwise they'd probably need some tact and grace to get the ship to its destination safely.

masklinn• 4 years ago

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander.

That’s not a difference at all, as it would be exactly what (2) were thinking of their new commands as well.

Ar-Curunir• 4 years ago

Has that approach ever succeeded anywhere?

kadoban• 4 years ago

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander

I mean, if you ask any commanders in group 2, they're going to all say that.

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

Your entire reasoning behind your comment indicates you don't understand this point I'm making about leadership. You're talking about a "new plan" as if we all agreed that Twitter was doing so badly that it needed a 180. You use "dissidents" and "better team" as if it's a fact that things are so bad and the team is so inept that Elon could do nothing but burn the place to the ground and make a phoenix from the ashes.

My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's current head, it's a massive organism and if you make systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium steps that are well-thought-out, over time.

escaper• 4 years ago

God how can I downvote this. Did you even read what the OP said? So in this case the "dissidents" are people that appreciate incremental change, like their opinions to be valued in their respective field of expertise, and possibly appreciate being able to work from home?

edwnj4• 4 years ago

Difference is you served (or are serving) during peacetime. This is wartime..

Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.

Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter) which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

The Navy doesn't differentiate between wartime and peacetime for training or operations, generally. The difference would lie in what type of ordnance we used (real during wartime, inert during peace) and the measures we operated under at sea (we'd emit less signals and dog the hatches).

Also, in wartime, it's actually even more important that a new CO didn't upset the delicate balance or change procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be deadly.

Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make assumptions.

thesuitonym• 4 years ago

Ah yes, it's like Sun Tzu said, the best way to wage a war is to get rid of half your army, and demoralize the other half.

alxlaz• 4 years ago

Seeing someone who served in the Navy being told that their peacetime service is very different from the war that Twitter is currently experiencing is... I'm not even sure how to react to that. Lots of execs like to stretch those military metaphors -- they're all in the trenches, all hands on deck, take no prisoners and all that -- but I think you may have stretched this one way past its breaking point.

bhaak• 4 years ago

Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin..

Whatever state Twitter was in before Musk entered with a white knight syndrome, it was in a better state than it is now.

Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.

Well, that was his first mistake at Twitter before he even "owned" it.

chson• 4 years ago

and generally acted like they owned the place

To be fair, he actually does own the place.

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

True, and to be fair, CO's have "own the place" power most times (while underway at least).

usefulcat• 4 years ago

ownership != operational knowledge

sixstringtheory7• 4 years ago

I award no points for fairness because that is completely beside the point.

samus2• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem like he really cares about the place though

cerved• 4 years ago

To be fair, he owns most of the place

klyrs3• 4 years ago

Only, he doesn't. His lenders do. And he's already talking bankruptcy.

msmith• 4 years ago

I wonder if you've read Turn the Ship Around [1]? It's one of my favorite leadership books and tells the true story of the Navy captain who was put in the awkward position of running a submarine class that he was not familiar with.

He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you describe in type 1.

[1] https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.

If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you notice he's writing books for a living now.

IG_Semmelweiss• 4 years ago

>>>> and generally acted like they owned the place

this is the $44B problem to your CO analogy.

Skin in the game. The world runs far better on it.

baxtr3• 4 years ago

Nah. He doesn’t own twitter like you own a house. People can just quit and leave.

In fact a CO might be in better position in that regard. Soldiers don’t quit as fast as devs.

thedorkknight4• 4 years ago

Whether or not they literally own the place is aside from the posters point about new leaders coming in and automatically upending everything without taking the time to actually listen to people and learn what actually is and isn't working. But yeah, it's an ironic choice of words.

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Skin in the game? A ship commander might die if something on the ship goes wrong.

sixstringtheory7• 4 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I see you edited your comment from the original:

this seems to be a significant problem to your CO analogy.

So let me ask you… how does a ship’s commanding officer not have more skin in the game? A rich person loses their second home or yacht when things go south… a person on a ship can hit the brig or lose their life.

tthun• 4 years ago

how much skin in the game .. isn’t this a leveraged buyout, with twitter on the hook for the borrowed money ..

baxtr3• 4 years ago

Steve Job’s return to Apple was 1)

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is 2)

thordenmark• 4 years ago

A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Whether or not you agree with those measures, well you don't have $44b on the line. Of all of Elon's businesses, this one is probably the most in his wheelhouse. He's a web guy after all.

Hamuko• 4 years ago

A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it.

Was it that before Musk actually decided to buy it? Because as far as I can tell, the ad dollars started dropping after his announcement.

Cyph0n3• 4 years ago

He’s a web guy after all

Of course he is.

citrined• 4 years ago

patient is dying, better chop off an arm and a leg and remove some of the monitors and move the patient to a different building.

gdubs2• 4 years ago

I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways, but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.

wefarrell• 4 years ago

He’s a web guy in the same way that Rudy Giuliani is an expert in criminal law. It was true in the 90s but definitely not anymore.

luckylion3• 4 years ago

Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?

When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?

killingtime74• 4 years ago

Of course there are standards, execution is another story

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?

There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be run with some discretion.

Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said "ok".

When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well,

Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good while.

does each ship have its own culture?

Yes, undoubtedly.

How do they coordinate?

Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc.

But seriously, we have some standards for operations that make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more to coalesce those ships into a unit.

thedorkknight4• 4 years ago

Military aircraft carriers are going to operate in a manner completely different from boats carrying skipping containers, if we're going with this analogy. The number of social media companies Musk had any experience running prior to buying Twitter is 0.

gdubs2• 4 years ago

When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over again was to live with it through a few seasons before making any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up to, where the best views are.

It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.

cpeterso• 4 years ago

Good advice about the seasons. Sounds like "Chesterton's Fence":

  The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [the fence] and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

the-printer• 4 years ago

Thanks for this..do you farm-blog by any chance?

curious_cat_1632• 4 years ago

You are assuming that he is optimizing for employee happiness. I am not associating a value judgement to whether that is the right/wrong move in Twitter's context.

I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon Musk might do to Twitter next.

It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to think that they won't barring some exceptions.

ok_dad9• 4 years ago

Actual happiness was not the point. In the Navy, the CO doesn't have to care about employee happiness, anyways, while Musk sort of does. 'Happiness' was a rhetorical device I used there.

samus2• 4 years ago

I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at seeing these social media empires being toppled.

The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.

mlindner2• 4 years ago

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.

adamredwoods• 4 years ago

Marissa Mayers and Yahoo in 2013:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi...

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...

sdze2• 4 years ago

Interesting aspect. So this could mean the beginning of the end of Twattr.

nomagicbullet• 4 years ago

I hope our leaders are measuring the right things. It's discouraging to read how Mayers came to her decision to ban remote work.

She said the decision stemmed from her first few months at Yahoo, when she was spending a couple of hours every day in the cafeteria talking to any employee who wanted to chat.

Selection bias.

Mayer decided on the ban after spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were and consulting Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Confirmation bias.

Both clear examples of cognitive bias: reading into easily accessible data as a proxy for relevant valid data and using it to justify decisions.

sytelus2• 4 years ago

During pandemic there was published paper (in nature?) that collected and analyzed thousands of employee data and arrived at same conclusion. It’s hard to stay disciplined when working remotely, apparently. However, I don’t think remote-only startups suffers from same issue. Moving traditional office employee to remote suddenly would be problematic unless there was a proper training for setting up home office, meeting etiquette, setting up cultural expectations etc.

Thorentis• 4 years ago

It's an employers market right now. With 11k laid off from Meta, and thousands more across tech, Twitter will have no issue finding staff if it needs them (assuming this decision causes even more to leave).

I'm not convinced that Twitter actually needs more than 1k staff though. 100 infrastructure engineers, 600 platform engineers, and 300 support staff should be all it takes to run a lean ship doing what Twitter does.

smeagull• 4 years ago

Seems like you'd end remote work before firing everybody, because now you have no idea if you're going to be able to keep the people you thought you could.

If you were planning these moves of course.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 4 years ago

I said before: "His company. He can do whatever he wants."

That said, good luck with all that Elon.

Unless the goal is to sink Twitter down, in which case it is a brilliant move, there is zero reason for RTO.

codingdave• 4 years ago

I've got to imagine that some of their revenue losses in advertising are due to the fact that various companies/brands simply don't want to be associated with Musk in the slightest. If he was serious about ad revenue, he'd also be serious about Twitter's branding.

Note that I'm not saying there are no Musk fans in the world - there are. But he is divisive, which is a trait not beneficial when trying to strengthen your brand.

PUSH_AX• 4 years ago

I'm just confused why anyone would still want to work there.

I don't know what the local markets are like but my priority would be to jump ship at all costs.

FredPret3• 4 years ago

Aka, “please resign en masse”

abxytg4• 4 years ago

Or -- he's stupid.

poszlem• 4 years ago

What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them".

[1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some applies to blood-thirsty CEOs.

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

Agreed.

I wouldn’t want to work for Twitter w/o remote work, but I don’t think he’s stupid.

ThrowawayTestr2• 4 years ago

The smartest man in the world can still make mistakes.

wittycardio3• 4 years ago

Success is not really a measure of intelligence. I actually think Elon is likely quite intelligent but a lot of success is determined by luck, ambition and attitude rather than pure intelligence. I definitely do not think Donald Trump is very intelligent, but he has undoubtedly been very successful.

willcipriano2• 4 years ago

Been saying this forever. It's never wise to call your enemies stupid, it makes it considerably more embarrassing when you lose to a idiot.

All of my enemies are 8 foot tall, einsteinian, gigachad supermen.

wombat-man• 4 years ago

I don't particularly dislike musk, but I'm happy to be on the sidelines of twitter. I like the site and hope he doesn't muck it up.

lumost• 4 years ago

There is a surprising amount of luck and happenstance in people reaching their current positions. Even great discoveries made by smart people often originate because someone was in the right place at the right time. Most societies rewards these events, for both the individual and through inheritance their children.

Musk may be cleverer than average, but he's also come to own twitter by virtue of being successful at building paypal, followed by being able to successfully deploy capital at impactful problems at SpaceX and Tesla. While impressive achievements, these achievements do not imply that Musk will be successful at Twitter. He's known for demanding people to do their best and hardest work by pointing them at seamingly impossible but impactful problems.

Will rescuing a failing social network motivate people in the same way? I don't think so. I'd probably be willing to work 60+ hours a week for average pay to solve global warming (TSLA) or colonize Mars (SpaceX) - I wouldn't be willing to make that sacrifice for Twitter.

uxcolumbo6• 4 years ago

Putin's and Musk's massive ego and narcissism will be their downfall.

By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more united than ever and more Russia border countries are going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed Russian economy. Tell me how that's not stupid?

I don't even have to go into Musk's actions. He massively overpaid for Twitter and to service the loan he has to pay $1bn a year. Even if he'd cut all his staff and millions would subscribe to Twitter blue - that wouldn't be enough to service the loan. Plus tons of advertisers left the platform because he's a loose canon spewing conspiracy theories. How is this not stupid?

ClumsyPilot4• 4 years ago

Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin are "stupid"

So Russia has all the natural resources you could wish for, economy the size of Italy's, economic crisis, most corruption in human history, and is currently loosing a war fighting a smaller country with weapons made 60 years ago.

Please remind me where is the genius I am missing?

danny_taco• 4 years ago

Elon or Putin are not stupid, far from it, but that doesn't mean they can't make stupid decisions, and not only make them but double down on them.

For example, look at Putin and the state of Russia and their invasion of Ukraine. I think everyone would agree it has been one of the biggest military and geopolitical blunders ever. As far as Elons acquisition of Twitter, time will tell if it was 'stupid' decision or not.

anothernewdude3• 4 years ago

I've read his leaked messages. He is stupid.

willnonya2• 4 years ago

You had a good point going until you tried to lump Trump in with the "not stupid" crowd.

There was no need to cross into that zone of stupidity.

danans8• 4 years ago

I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity. Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will tell.

bilbo0s• 4 years ago

This.

He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where he is with the Twitter deal.

So at this point it's all about leading from where you are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where there are zero good options. Every option is terrible, and probably won't work to extricate you from your situation.

But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the situation Elon is in.

gw9811• 4 years ago

I suspect this is the real problem.

Stupid people with money can look like they are clever because the layer of people immediately underneath them actually wields the clue stick.

Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't afford the layer of clever people underneath them.

Clever people are either abstracting the liability via stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with designing and building products with the other clever people around them.

Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.

joshstrange5• 4 years ago

Yep, it's a whole class of equating X thing with being "virtuous" (or similar). Your height, your sex, your weight, your hairline, your income/savings, etc. It's uncomfortable to talk about or admit but people regularly take controllable (or uncontrollable) traits and assign value to them even though it doesn't have any actual bearing.

"Oh that billionaire did something that seems odd/crazy to me? Well he must know something I don't else how would be be a billionaire!" - Yeah, that's not how things work. What's the line? "Past performance is not indicative of future results", paraphrasing it: "Past advantages are not indicative of future results". Very, very few "self-made million/billionaires" are anything of the sort. I'm not saying their lives have never been hard or that they have never worked hard at something but I think you'd find that, at scale, most people would succeed if put into that position (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to prove).

jackmott42• 4 years ago

It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX, built both companies into unlikely leaders in their industry with powerful people trying to crush them all the way, while being a total idiot.

A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very good at leading a company to build actual hardware that has to solve hard physics problems. At twitter the primary challenge is managing people, and he is autistic and has no idea how to do this. He has no idea how normal people experience or use twitter, no idea how his tweets are felt by people, no idea how his employees feel about him etc.

all of these are things that don't matter when building a rocket or a car, while understanding people and politics is the ONLY thing that matters at twitter.

nyokodo7• 4 years ago

Stupid people with money can look like they are clever

I get it, some people hate Elon’s guts and equally hate Elon fans. I also think that it’s pretty well established that he has a range of character flaws that really hurt him and threaten his future success. However, anyone who insinuates that Elon is stupid needs to establish how a genuinely stupid person could found two successful dot coms and then hire all the brilliant engineers that have made his subsequent companies so successful against such odds and become the world’s richest person. Luck and debatable opinions about his alleged wealthy upbringing cannot explain this. Even assuming all the highly debatable opinions about his technical contributions any reasonable observer must admit he is at least a genius at hiring the right people to achieve his vision and then avoiding getting in their way enough to make enormous inroads and sell it all brilliantly. I am far from an Elon fan but I couldn’t hope to achieve 5% of what he has.

whydoyoucare• 4 years ago

US typically uses pretty strong adjectives. Like my kid keeps on "hating" everything, and there are no shades of gray. Maybe that's how you are using "stupid"? Haha.

rchaud6• 4 years ago

$44bn all-cash at a meme-y $54.20....for Twitter, the least profitable of the major social media networks.

just think, the board would have accepted $50 per share, but he went with something that included 420, costing himself an additional 8% on the purchase price.

Stupid sounds about right.

rrsmtz• 4 years ago

Alternatively, discussing Elon Musk makes people act like children. Something to think about...

abxytg4• 4 years ago

Yea definitely a similar usage to hating, being a hater.

hrbf• 4 years ago

At this point this is the only explanation that makes any sense. Elon Musk may very well be a moron who has been incredibly lucky until now.

willnonya2• 4 years ago

Available evidence suggest otherwise.

no-dr-onboard• 4 years ago

Heinlen's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is easily explained by stupidity

jimsmart• 4 years ago

That's Hanlon's razor.

foxylad• 4 years ago

He's not stupid in the domains he understands. I think his problem is impulse control, and he's impulsively bought into a business that he knows little about.

I do think hard times are coming for Musk. As well as burning billions on Twitter, Tesla is no longer the vangard of the EV market, Boring seems to be a dead end, and I haven't heard anything about the solar enterprise for years. Space X seems to be still innovating, and I hope Musk isn't completely cleaned out so his Mars aspirations still bear fruit.

appleflaxen• 4 years ago

He is bipolar, which I think is a more plausible answer.

Can a person really become the richest person on earth being stupid? Maybe, but I think it strains credulity a bit.

scarface_745• 4 years ago

Seeing that by no reasonably objective measure should Tesla be worth what it is, maybe he is just a good marketer.

I’m not saying that “marketing” alone made Tesla successful. I am saying that it made the stock valuable.

memish8• 4 years ago

It's intellectual dishonest to the extreme to say he's stupid.

If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:

"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."

sixothree2• 4 years ago

Have you listened to him speak for any length of time? It's painful.

abxytg4• 4 years ago

I didn't meant to paint stupid as an absolute. He is smart too. Some of the smartest people I know are some of the stupidest people I know and vice versa -- its all relative. I think in this arena he's behaving stupidly. I mean hey I think he does in those other arena too but I'm not going to argue against technical people that have been in those rooms with him.

abxytg4• 4 years ago

also can you please explain why you have all of these quotes about elon on deck.... are you elon? or just a little obsessed

P_I_Staker• 4 years ago

Yeah, but some of those people are fucking idiots.

rdtwo4• 4 years ago

I think he just had bipolar or something and does crazy shit

dang• 4 years ago

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We've had to ask you this kind of thing before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552827.

somecommit• 4 years ago

Do not forget that twitter purchased Vine and shoot it off, just in order to enable Tiktok taking over. That's not a very smart company for sure.

jedberg• 4 years ago

The number one result when you search for Twitter on HN:

Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever (buzzfeednews.com)

2953 points by minimaxir on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 1353 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647

throwayyy4790872• 4 years ago

I’ve been told many times that Twitter is a private company and can do whatever it wants.

Or does that only apply to the Red team?

baobabKoodaa3• 4 years ago

Does "whatever it wants" include making contractual promises and then breaking them? Because I wasn't aware private companies had the right to rescind contracts at will.

RavingGoat5• 4 years ago

Lots of spineless throwaway accounts in these threads

fnordpiglet8• 4 years ago

Is there any reason for anyone to stay at twitter? I’ve not seen Musk offer any upside anywhere to remaining. He’s laying out a stark plan of hard work and fewer benefits and a brutal management. What reason other than inability to find another job (perhaps due to visa status, the hiring freezes at end of year, and layoffs) does anyone have for working at twitter now? I’m shocked if they don’t see another 50+% voluntary attrition in 2023.

bottlepalm2• 4 years ago

Even though the pay is lower and hours longer - at his other companies they offered stock options that at least 20x’d over the past 10 years at SpaceX and Tesla.

If the employees at Twitter think under Musk’s leadership that they can grow the company to 200 billion or more - then yea it’d be worth staying to collect stock that no one else can get now.

Hopefully they’re giving the remaining employees generous stock awards for staying. With the user base they have there’s no reason they can’t grow the company a lot with the the right strategy.

Musk has already discussed attacking YouTube directly and it sounds like he wants to expand into other social network niches. The whole X.com thing.

A lot of Twitter employees could come out pretty wealthy if successful. If it were me I’d stick around a year at least to see which way this whole thing is going.

nickstinemates• 4 years ago

Would be interesting to know if the company is recapitalized/option pool reset and what the new deal is for the remaining employees in terms of options like a traditional startup.

Would lend credence to the belief to have outsized returns for the brutality.

I'd also imagine if this ends in a positive financial turnaround, against all expectations of the peanut gallery, it would be a really impressive career achievement.

bcoughlan• 4 years ago

New boss wants subscriptions to account for half of revenue

Bahaha, be careful what you wish for!

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

"at least 40 hours in the office"

Why would anyone work for this douche? Even if you make a lot of money, you aren't going to get your time back later. There's no reward for killing yourself to appease a rich workaholic. The only prize you win is burning out or getting laid off.

brailsafe• 4 years ago

I suppose that'd apply to any place though, especially in the U.S wouldn't it?

Tomis022• 4 years ago

a rich workaholic

Umm, does he actually work-work? Or is he in meetings yapping all day?

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.

Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.

So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.

In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.

misiti37802• 4 years ago

All of the people (or most of the people) that matter would not have left Twitter for Elon's new company. Tons of people have tried this.

Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off the ground and it had a ton of YC press.

Network affects are real.

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon.

Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017):

"So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723

kondro• 4 years ago

You're right. But how much marketing can $44B and time buy you to replicate these network effects?

There are plenty of people trying to replicate the success of the existing social networks, but they're all doing it for $10's - $100's millions.

How much traction would you get if you paid the top 5,000 Twitter accounts $5 million to post exclusively on your new social network?

throwuwu5• 4 years ago

The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter’s brand and established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans it wouldn’t have the penetration needed to loop more people in.

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.

awinder2• 4 years ago

Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on Truth Social 2.0.

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get top dev talent lol?

thr0wawayf005• 4 years ago

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.

It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price.

We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

Your theory is the one that seems most plausible to me. Pushed into a decision he thought he could back out of and now trying to fix it the best way he sees fit.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

I may be missing something, but would it have been that hard to fail to get financing and get out of it, since it was a bad deal that others shouldn't want to finance, if he had started working on failing to get financing before he... succefully lined up financing?

I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive twitter into the ground and throw away his and others billions.

The whole thing is very bizarre from the start to now.

wingworks• 4 years ago

Allot of how Elon handled the layoffs from what's public doesn't sound ideal. But also idk how many of those people would've had a job at twitter for much longer anyway. We get a post in HN every other day at the moment of x company laying of 1000 of people.

rmbyrro3• 4 years ago

I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech thing is just marketing.

runarberg2• 4 years ago

When you are this rich, stuff like this doesn’t matter. Even if he lost all the 40 Bn USD means he’ll still be the richest person on earth, that’s how much money he has. To keep with the poker analogy, his “bluff” involved only 40 poker chips, but he has 200 after the fact, while his “opponents” have 1 or 2 each.

But in the end, money will always end up in his hands no matter what he does. When you are this rich, you’ll always end up making money.

sytelus2• 4 years ago

Story I read in one of the tweets from his old friend was that he has surrounded himself with too many yes man who work overtime to boost his ego. I can imagine he casually mentioning idea of buying Twitter and all the yes men praising him for his brilliance. No one did due diligence to figure out that he would need to sell $4B of his TSLA stock just to avoid bankruptcy after spending $44B.

shp0ngle• 4 years ago

He doesn’t want to build a better twitter.

He wants to _own this twitter_.

jonny_eh• 4 years ago

"You made this? I made this." https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4

lesuorac2• 4 years ago

I wonder if he'll get himself retroactive added as a founder of twitter in the past just like tesla.

PartiallyTyped6• 4 years ago

And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.

No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship.

Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users.

For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either.

Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate.

Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.

jensvdh• 4 years ago

If you paid me anywhere between 750-1.5M a year just go on in the office 40 hours a week I'd take that offer any day every day.

I did the same for less than half of that not even 2 years ago.

The problem with Musk companies is 1) It'll be MINIMUM 40 hours a week, no WLB 2) His companies aren't known for paying competitively

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.

VirusNewbie• 4 years ago

Didn’t need to be too competitive when you had 11x stock growth. Will be interesting to see if things change now that their stock is flatish.

ur-whale• 4 years ago

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.

Two things to counter that idea:

1. Social apps aren't about features, they're about the network effect and the user base. Rebuilding that of Twitter at this stage would have been very hard.

2. Even assuming that was possible, the time it would take to rebuild something like it means guaranteed failure.

eftychis2• 4 years ago

He bought the users not the equipment, developers etc. The brand and domain is what he bought -- in his mind at least.

throw8383833jj2• 4 years ago

Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done, it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not the case.

autospeaker2210• 4 years ago

Makes sense.. there's a small handful of social media platforms people actually use compared to cemetery of failed attempts.

gray_-_wolf• 4 years ago

Isn't one exception to this the case when you control both the old and new platform, and can technically just migrate what content possible and just replace the old one with new? It technically does not even have to be "new" platform, it could be presented as "twitter redesign".

fortydegrees• 4 years ago

Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.

selectout• 4 years ago

I'm always curious if he just set aside say $250k/year (2 year contract maybe?) to the top 100 content creators at Twitter/IG/TikTok today.

Add $25 million to the annual costs and have the chicken/egg problem semi-saved.

siquick• 4 years ago

This is a pretty naive take on how hard it is to build a application that relies on any kind of network effect, activation, and retention, not to mention a complex ad platform that needs CS/Sales to even get it off the ground.

dools• 4 years ago

It would be even cheaper to just buy the political influence he is trying to wield by directly funding politicians like his buddy Peter Thiel. Corrupting the GOP is surprisingly inexpensive for the value you receive in return.

qez• 4 years ago

So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too

No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.

Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.

TulliusCicero5• 4 years ago

That money would get you a very robust prototype, but getting to scale requires building a lot of random other features that most users aren't aware of, plus being around long enough with half-decent community management to acquire users.

Companies like Twitter don't get big for no reason. Yes, there's obviously some bloat, but a lot of it's just random 'non-core' features that still need to get done.

vonseel• 4 years ago

I’m just guessing, but maybe Elon really loves Twitter. Building a new platform wouldn’t allow him to rescue the thing he loves. Seems more like an emotional decision than a logical one.

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

Disagree, a lot.

Most people underestimate two things, IMHO. One is obvious: the cost of convincing everyone that Muskitter is the place to go.

The second one? You could NOT build a twitter equivalent for a billion dollars. I'd be happy to take bets.

Corollary to number two: building it means actually two things: one, building it, and two, having a team that can start from the moment of finished building it, and continue developing and bug fixing and supporting the platform from T+1 onwards.

NewEntryHN• 4 years ago

cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter

That's cute.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

I actually have no strong opinions about whether remote work must be allowed or not... but presumably this is going to result in more people leaving, right? Presumably he knows this, right? (Maybe he's even counting on it?).

I guess this is an interesting experiment in how much staff turnover you can have at a tech company like Twitter and still do fine.

I personally would not expect it to go well. Losing everyone who knows how things work and starting over from scratch with all new employees in as short a time period as possible, or even doing your best to approach that asymptote... that can't be a good idea, can it?

dmalvarado• 4 years ago

Must be in office. Must work at least 40 hours per week. Eliminated days of rest. As if twitter's problems are caused by "employees not working enough".

skc• 4 years ago

Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue

I've seen a lot of people calculating how many subscriptions would be required to hit this number as of today, but they're all forgetting to factor in Apple's and/or Google's cut.

pdx6• 4 years ago

This whole thing is SGI syndrome. The tight knit teams that were either let go or quit Twitter will go and found the next equivalent Nvidia or Adobe. Elon is making the classic Valley blunder of trying to make a company something it's not, in this case x.com. See also AOL, Yahoo!, and Tumber.

If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat my shoe however.

eb0la• 4 years ago

I wasn't interested in buying a Tesla. Now I won't pay for Twitter.

AtNightWeCode• 4 years ago

So, this is just to get rid of more people without having to lay them off. Coaching out people is not very 2022. Will cost Twitter more than it is worth for sure.

elif• 4 years ago

i guess this is one way to deflate the tech bubble

ryanSrich• 4 years ago

We call this a soft layoff.

hsuduebc23• 4 years ago

Ofcourse it is his company so he can do whatever he want but this man turned out to be kinda douchebag in last few years.

joshe• 4 years ago

Would be wonderfully ironic if Elon saves downtown SF.

valbaca• 4 years ago

It's pretty obvious that Musk is willfully (or ignorantly) forcing people out of the company in order to pre-filter before layoffs.

If you're at Twitter and can get a job elsewhere, don't panic. Save up, apply elsewhere, quiet-quit but DO NOT QUIT. Make them fire you or lay you off. MAKE them payout the severance! Don't let Musk toss you out for free.

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

MAKE them payout the severance!

Most states don't require any severance. The WARN act creates de facto 60 days, but if you can keep it below the threshold or show that the firing was with cause (like if you quiet quit), it won't even count against that.

ADuckOnQuack• 4 years ago

You know that “quiet quitting” just means doing the absolute requirements of your job and nothing more above and beyond right? What cause could you use? “Employee only works exact amount of hours as required in employment contract and completes average number of tasks per day” is absolutely not a just cause.

uptownfunk• 4 years ago

It's a blood bath out there folks. Stay safe.

Zafira• 4 years ago

“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”—All the President’s Men (1976)

ldbooth• 4 years ago

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.

wgj• 4 years ago

Wow, it worked on me. I didn't see this until I just now searched for it.

https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/twitter-ciso-resigns/...

propogandist2• 4 years ago

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://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

joenathanone2• 4 years ago

Ok propogandist

electrondood2• 4 years ago

"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.

tvaughan• 4 years ago

This story has been debunked, https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/bullshit-reporting-the-i...

nebula88043• 4 years ago

Yeah this is Musk 101. My favorite one was the day before a massive whistleblower article came out about Tesla he literally released a Tesla Cyberwhistle. "BLOW THE WHISTLE" he said. Afterwards all searches for Tesla whistleblower were articles about this tiny piece of metal he put up for sale in his shop. Genius.

jonnycomputer• 4 years ago

I imagine he'll still "remote work" though.

stephc_int13• 4 years ago

I used to naively believe in the Elon Musk hype.

I started to be suspicious about his super-human intellect a few years ago.

The more I dig and the more I observe his behavior, the less impressed I am, there is a huge number of red flags.

I think he is much closer to Elizabeth Holmes than most people realize.

I will be a financial bloodbath when the fraud will be unmasked.

jti107• 4 years ago

good luck hiring new software engineers

bastardoperator• 4 years ago

How to speedrun a business into the ground... by Elon Muskrat

xyst• 4 years ago

What’s with this guy and hating remote work? Does he just want people to be forced to hear his ranting bullshit in a workplace?

linuxhansl• 4 years ago

Step 1: Buy company, load it with debt in the process.

Step 2: Claim company is not profitable (partially due to the interest payments you yourself loaded onto it)

Step 3: Lay off 1/2 the staff.

Step 4: Try to get some of these people back, because you need some projects done (that actually happened)

Step 5: Enforce unpopular and useless work rules.

Step 6: Profit... Maybe?

I want to believe that he knows what he is doing, but it certainly does not look that way!

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

Step 1 is more like he bought it with a corporate version of a mortgage.

1attice• 4 years ago

I would suggest he is indeed brilliant, but also a fool.

Fools are often brilliant, but they are parted from their money all the same.

The question is: does Musk have enough brilliance to achieve escape velocity from his folly?

larsonnn• 4 years ago

Please just ignore him.

Humans shouldn’t have this much money. They do the same shitty deals like people with no money but with bigger consequences.

msie• 4 years ago

Is it me or has Twitter not been as responsive lately?

1letterunixname2• 4 years ago

Because butt-in-seat mentality, working 80 hrs a week, and moving a rocking horse really fast equals morale and productivity.

Any employee with self-respect should go on strike and put their resume in somewhere else.

I have the feeling Elon only makes money off people who enable him to act like a bully.

aiwv• 4 years ago

The key to understanding Musk is that he truly believes that he will be the most powerful person in the world (see https://web.archive.org/web/20200725103243/https://www.nytim... for his friend's take) and that he is utterly shameless and will do whatever he thinks is best in service of that destiny.

One cannot take anything that he says at face value. He is a repeated and proven liar (fully self driving cars in 6 months!). When he says he wants more free speech on twitter, I think it's fair to assume the opposite. Whatever the true Elon may be, his public persona has become that of a megalomaniacal bully, not unlike the ousted troll in chief. Whether this is cynical or authentic, I want no part of any organization with him at the top.

My personal theory is that he bought twitter specifically to make it his private megaphone. Owning the platform will prevent him from being turned off ala Trump. It also will allow him to silence his critics. He won't outright ban them, but by removing content moderation, he will allow those who criticize him to be harassed by his human army of troll bots until the platform becomes so toxic that they all leave.

The bankers love this because twitter is also the platform where the most people are directly criticizing corporate capitalism and challenging its bedrock assumptions. They win no matter what Musk does. In silencing his critics, he will also be silencing their critics. If driving them off of twitter somehow is good for business, then they get a return on their investment. If instead it kills the platform, they can just write off their losses on their taxes. The financiers are very unlikely to actually lose any money on the deal, but the silencing of their own critics would almost certainly be worth $40B to them anyway.

Now that the deal has closed, twitter is in a liminal state between life and death. Its demise has been pretty much written into the terms of the acquisition.

One question that I'd pose to everyone is do you want to live in a world in which Elon Musk is the most powerful person? Do you really believe in his vision? Is it a positive vision for the world or a dystopian one? Does it reflect the worst of us or the best of us?

Rapzid• 4 years ago

Musk bought Twitter as a bad deal. He's way upside down on the worth vs the debt to investors and bankers. He needs to squeeze blood from a stone.

The end.

TigeriusKirk• 4 years ago

From his all hands today -

Employee: Why is our leadership trying to increase attrition rate if we’re already understaffed and barely able to keep things running?

Musk: I’m not trying to increase attrition, but I think we are not understaffed. I think we are overstaffed. That is my opinion, which you’re welcome to disagree with.

the-anarchist• 4 years ago

I wish there was a way to filter 'twitter' from all incoming HTTP.

out-of-ideas• 4 years ago

well now he can get buy-in from other companies wanting to flex their muscles and try to get employees to not work in a distributed fashion ... (maybe a repeat though in this number of comments)

magundu• 4 years ago

People are talking about mass layoff in Twitter. But remember that,Steve Jobs did the same thing 25 years ago (after he rejoined Apple). Steve has fired 4000 people right way to reduce the expenses and hired people needed for his mission.

loceng• 4 years ago

It's the fastest way to purposefully destroy whatever culture has formed (arguably poorly if the company is in its present state), and then can quickly rehire based on new, arguably better, direction; risky bet IMHO to bet against Elon with his track record of making at least more good decisions than bad ones, so far, with Tesla, SpaceX, etc.

itsdrewmiller• 4 years ago

That wasn't all that similar:

https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/

It was a smaller fraction of workers (30%) and was the third layoff in the past year, with the previous two happening before Jobs had even rejoined the company (and he wouldn't become CEO for 6 more months, though likely he was shadow CEO only 4 months later).

olliecornelia• 4 years ago

Let that boy cook.

replwoacause• 4 years ago

Man Elon Musk is just the worst.

mlindner2• 4 years ago

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.

Jemm• 4 years ago

Difference between Musk and Zuckerberg's handling of layoffs is striking.

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

(I am on the older side on here probably) Having come from a difficult background, worked some really Shitty jobs and served in the army before I got a degree and started in tech I have been a bit shocked and a bit amused at the endless stream of less than average developers running around demanding to be treated like kings.

An extreme example of demanded privilege.

There has been royalty for IT and slavery for the rest. Look at how Amazon treats their factory / wearhouse workers. They dont treat the IT staff better because they are such great people. Once developers become easy to replace (should that happen) then the whip will make much more of an impression on the deposed royalty.

Or we just have some layoffs, and we have a lot of comapnies hiring still and it just continues just a little less fluffing I

nurettin• 4 years ago

I thought Elon was making it the literal hell to work at twitter and firing everyone left and right just to appease investors, but he delisted TWTR stock from NYSE? now I'm confused.

Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

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