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Hundreds of Twitter Employees Leaving After Elon Musk's 'Extremely Hardcore' Work Demands

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contacos said:
Don’t you remember the email? „People who chose not to click yes, will be let go and receive 3 months of severance“
Click to expand...
www.businessinsider.com

Elon Musk failed to give laid-off Twitter employees previously promised severance packages, lawsuit alleges

Previous management told employees that they would keep the same severance benefits after Elon Musk bought Twitter, the lawsuit alleges.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

At this point, I can only say that I will believe it when I see it.

I agree that Twitter's business model wasn't working and it was in sore need of an overhaul, and I am actually in favour of a change in management but I look at what Elon Musk is doing with the company and I am having a hard time believing that this is somehow all for the better, or that there hasn't been a less chaotic and disruptive way of going about all of this.

I am happy to be proven wrong on this though, because I do enjoy using twitter (or at least, accessing twitter via Tweetbot) and using it as my tech news feed, and I sure hope it stays around.
 
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Red Oak said:
I bet the ones that stay, work hard and excel will get VERY RICH

I know - something hard to understand for those who are offended when it rains

And, who try to crap on everyone else’s success
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The best engineers will find a new job in a less toxic environment in no time. The ones that stay will be yes-man who are great at faking their job.
 
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Abazigal said:
www.businessinsider.com

Elon Musk failed to give laid-off Twitter employees previously promised severance packages, lawsuit alleges

Previous management told employees that they would keep the same severance benefits after Elon Musk bought Twitter, the lawsuit alleges.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

At this point, I can only say that I will believe it when I see it.

I agree that Twitter's business model wasn't working and it was in sore need of an overhaul, and I am actually in favour of a change in management but I look at what Elon Musk is doing with the company and I am having a hard time believing that this is somehow all for the better, or that there hasn't been a less chaotic and disruptive way of going about all of this.

I am happy to be proven wrong on this though, because I do enjoy using twitter (or at least, accessing twitter via Tweetbot) and using it as my tech news feed, and I sure hope it stays around.
Click to expand...

Even if Elon's Twitter completely DIES (bankruptcy with no return), that only means technology start-ups and human innovation will create a replacement for Twitter. If there is a vacuum to "fill in the shoes of a service like Twitter", then a new service (or three) will appear and do so.

It will be a brand new medium. Without Elon. And of course the name will be different. But the same functionality will be there, possibly even superior.
 
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Solomani said:
Even if Elon's Twitter completely DIES (bankruptcy with no return), that only means technology start-ups and human innovation will create a replacement for Twitter. If there is a vacuum to "fill in the shoes of a service like Twitter", then a new service (or three) will appear and do so.

It will be a brand new medium. Without Elon. And of course the name will be different. But the same functionality will be there, possibly even superior.
Click to expand...
The issue is - twitter isn't profitable, and has somehow been able to amble on thanks to investor funding and brand advertising. It's this anomaly that just happened to be at the right place at the right time and basically defied the odds to make it till today.

If Twitter does die, I am not convinced there will be a business case to create twitter 2.0, knowing fully well that investors will never see their money back.

Who knows - maybe we will all end up doing back to Tumblr.
 
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Seoras said:
Why pay severance to get rid of dead weight when you can just chase them out of the door with the threat of hard labour.
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Because if you had half a clue about workers' rights and business, you will learn this is called constructive dismissal.

While I have no clue about US worker rights, in Europe (and the UK), an employer will be royally shafted for this. It protects you, the employee from exactly this situation, or if you are a manager, it protects workers from people with mindsets like yours.

And lest I remind you, this "dead-weight" will have families to support. Bills to pay. Have a little compassion for goodness sake.
 
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h3ysw5nkan said:
In behaviour economics, we learned that the number of employees doing most of the work in a team or company can be calculated by the square root of the total employees.

So...

Team of 4, then 2.

Team of 9, then 3.

Team of 16, then 4.

...

Team of 100, only 10.

...

Team of 10,000, only 100. <-- This is approximately the scale of Twitter before Elon.

I would keep firing and shed the deadweight.

The difficult part is to keep the best employees and let go the bad ones. One thing you can never do is to lower compensation. This will only drive away the best, who got options. The only alternative is firing and trimming all the time.
Click to expand...
Very interesting.

So of the 10 000 teams, Elon should be able to terminate 9 900 teams, as the 100 left "are doing most of the job". Save 99% of employee cost while getting the same work done.

The really clever thing is what comes next. Because "In behaviour economics, we learned that the number of employees doing most of the work in a team or company can be calculated by the square root of the total employees." So of these 100 teams, only 10 are needed. In this second wave Elon fires 90 teams, because the 10 left are doing most of the job.


With the knowledge of behaviour economics, he fires 6 of the 10 teams left in the third wave.

In the fourth wave, he fires the 2 bad teams of the 4 left.

In the fifth wave, he fires the last teams.

Being Elon, he should be able to accomplish this in a week, ending up with running the entire company alone.
 
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Aftermath747 said:
“Forcing them to work in the office”
How entitled do you have to be to be offended that you’re expected to work at the place you work.
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Because once the pandemic hit, Twitter changed their policy to https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-employees-can-work-home-forever-ceo-says-n1205346. Twitter still ran fine with that policy. It's pretty crazy to suddenly give workers <12 hours notice that they're suddenly supposed to be in the office. I bet a lot of people relocated to somewhere not within commuting distance.

At my company where we did NOT like remote work before the pandemic, our company changed stances. Now many (most?) teams are ok with some to all remote workers. Office attendance is super low. Some managers and higher up moved out of the area, including my manager. We've hired ICs, management and upper management and they work remotely, from other states. It opened up the pool of applicants to lots of people who didn't want to move to the Bay Area for many reasons (e.g. super expensive here, high taxes, friends, family, etc.)

I live in the SF Bay Area. You do know how much it is to rent or buy a place here, right?

www.noradarealestate.com

Bay Area Housing Market: Trends and Forecast 2025

Get the latest on the Bay Area housing market in 2025. Discover trends in home sales, prices, inventory, and the impact of mortgage rates.
www.noradarealestate.com www.noradarealestate.com
www.kron4.com

This city is predicted to surpass San Francisco for most expensive rent, according to Zumper

Since the pandemic started disrupting rental patterns, the city has slowly been losing that reputation.
www.kron4.com www.kron4.com
 
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oh well...
 

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Seoras said:
Why pay severance to get rid of dead weight when you can just chase them out of the door with the threat of hard labour.
Click to expand...
You don’t chase out dead weight though. The people that go in these situations are the ones that know they are good enough to find another job reasonably easily. The people that stay also probably want to leave but know they aren’t as capable and need the money.

So all you end up with here is losing your top performers and keeping your worst.
 
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TheYayAreaLiving 🎗 said:
What a waste of money. He could have used that money to save humanity or eliminate world hunger. I feel really bad for the people working at Twitter and they have to deal with Elon. The fact it’s around Thanksgiving and holidays time makes it worst. I believe in Karma and Elon should too. 🧿🪬
Click to expand...
If there is one thing I agree with Musk, is when someone told him exactly what you said. He asked said person to explain to him how he would do that.

He's still waiting for a reply.

Edit: here's the story

fortune.com

Elon Musk gave a mysterious $5.7 billion donation weeks after he dared the UN to show him its plan for solving world hunger

The UN World Food Program executive director David Beasley said global elites should step up, and that $6 billion would help feed people at risk of starvation.
fortune.com fortune.com
 
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗 said:
What a waste of money. He could have used that money to save humanity or eliminate world hunger. I feel really bad for the people working at Twitter and they have to deal with Elon. The fact it’s around Thanksgiving and holidays time makes it worst. I believe in Karma and Elon should too. 🧿🪬
Click to expand...
It’s cost the world about $12 trillion so far just for ‘fixing’ Covid; I’m not sure $40b would have been able to save anyone! Let him have his fun :D
 
beanbaguk said:
Because if you had half a clue about workers' rights and business, you will learn this is called constructive dismissal.

While I have no clue about US worker rights, in Europe (and the UK), an employer will be royally shafted for this. It protects you, the employee from exactly this situation, or if you are a manager, it protects workers from people with mindsets like yours.

And lest I remind you, this "dead-weight" will have families to support. Bills to pay. Have a little compassion for goodness sake.
Click to expand...
Given the extreme circumstances of what is going on with Twitter and the mass firing of it's employees, even such extremes does not protect employees in the EU and UK. Best example of this is the recent mass sacking of UK P&O workers. They were all sacked in one day and replaced with cheap foreign labour the next. The CEO of the company even publicly admited that he broke the law in the way he sacked the UK staff and what has the UK government done about it? nothing. Granted the government asked various agencies to look into if anything could be done against the company but so far no agency has come back with anything positive.

P&O have appeared to have got away with it so I can only assume Musk will think he will get away with how he has mass fired the Twitter employee's.
 
unQuestionable said:
Y’all are funny. This is how you rebuild a company and make it a whole new successful thing. Just relax. It’s obviously going to be a transitory period. Watch and see for sure. Good stuff.
Click to expand...

It's transitory, for sure.

And it's a complete rebuild.

But it's also done in an extremely high-risk way.

There are lots of things here that makes one worry.

Like firing critical employees, then trying to convince them to come back.

Or changing policies, only to discover they were in place for a purpose.

Or now trying to find a CEO to run Twitter instead of having one lined up in the months before taking control of Twitter.

Or making nonsensical technological claims on Twitter and being called out on it by your own engineers and then rather than admitting your mistake, firing the engineers (he has the right to fire them, but it sure raises some red flags as to how well he actually understands his own company's technology).

Or calling twitter a "software and servers company". While technically correct, it ignores that Twitter is fundamentally a publishing company.

All of these things have one thing in common - they are indicative of someone who has not deeply considered what he is doing. They are whimsical and lacking a clear plan or vision.

You - true to your name - seem to whistle past all of this unQuestioningly (pardon the pun). Why is that?
 
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