Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-missed-payroll-for-some-european-staff-this-month/

by mkeeter • 4 years ago

36 12 4 years ago

Wow, that is ALWAYS a bad sign. Any talent that hasn't already left is going to once Twitter starts getting funny with their money.

vietthan• 4 years ago

Or on visa

sschueller• 4 years ago

This is really bad especially in the EU. You may get away with such shenanigans in the US but not in the EU. Expect Twitter to be taken through the ringer very soon.

I'm going to have to buy more popcorn. Already ran out after what Elon has been tweeting today at Apple...

mrguyorama• 4 years ago

It's possible this has nothing to do with having empty coffers, and everything to do with the payroll department missing important and necessary people

themadturk• 4 years ago

I'm surprised it's only a subset of people, and not all of them laid-off employees. Losing HR and payroll departments is a very bad thing.

andrewflnr• 4 years ago

...Why would we think it's anything other than an administrative screw-up?

steego• 4 years ago

Ok, I understand Elon wanting to reduce the staff and focus on engineering on some level. I don’t agree with his decisions, but I can of understand the motivation on some level. He wants to focus on a few very important things and discard everything else.

What I don’t understand is: Don’t you want your people to be able to focus on their jobs and not deal with nonsense like this?

This is why you have good HR people. This is why you have a good communications department.

How does he expect to recruit talented people when it looks like a shit-show from the outside?

I don’t know the typical demographic of Ars Technica readers, but there’s not a lot of people on the comment board rushing to defend him.

The Elon fans I know seem to hold out that he may pull something out of his back pocket, but they also seem to qualify it with being disappointed with his current performance.

To be honest, I would love to hear someone tell me why I am completely wrong in my assessment. What do you think I’m missing?

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

He's not running a company, he's running a cult of personality. The suffering is the point. Every inconvience or ridiculous demand further cements the people who are left as true believers, and in return they get to tell their war stories of the 90 hour weeks and incredible all nighters.

Why's he doing that? Well, over the last 15 years he's been cultivating a public persona as real life Iron man and over the last few years he's started to believe it. When he tells a story of the child he held in his hands as it died, he really means it. He's lying, as his wife of the time will tell you, but he believes it. He's genuinely forgotten which parts of his life really happened.

rsynnott• 4 years ago

I mean, Occam's, and Hanlon's, razors say that there's no evil masterplan here, he's just incompetent. There may not be that much point searching for _meaning_ in it.

MaysonL• 4 years ago

Brings back memories of my first programming job, when my paycheck bounced - the company had a million-buck overdraft at Citi (or whatever they were called at the time - '69). For the next couple months, the founder paid me from his wife's checking account.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Did they take down the HR/payroll microservice?

Guess we needed that one after all

twiddling• 4 years ago

When you start missing payroll...

Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time

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