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

[Felix01]

I guess I can understand why Musk wants employees back in the office 40 hours/week. It's really difficult (but doable) to manage employees from afar. Management has to be properly trained on how to supervise geographically separated employees to maintain productivity. That means a lot of extra work for the managers and they push back and advocate for a return to the pre-pandemic model.

I was recently reading an article claiming Fortune 500 companies were getting an average of seven hours of productive work out of an eight-hour work day, pre-pandemic. But during the height of the pandemic, the authors estimated that fell to slightly under five hours/day ... primarily because managers did a poor job of setting goals, laying out tasks with realistic deadlines, and holding employees accountable.

 

[dugbug]

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.

which ones are dead weight?

Firing from the hip, picking fights in public with your employees, never addressing 'town hall style' with the employees, no vision other than the words 'twitter 2.0', etc.

If Elon used the 3 months that he fought the purchase to wisely plan out his management team and assess employees and the roadmaps and prep HR for targeted firings (dead weight, mismatched skill sets, etc) and then explained twitter 2.0 to his company he would have employees motivated and willing to bust their butts.

 

[SnappleRumors]

A class action lawsuit was filed over a week ago. Twitter/Musk didn't give sufficient notice with his mass layoffs as is required under federal and state law.

Twitter sued over short-notice layoffs as Elon Musk's takeover rocks company

The class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco and alleges Twitter violated the WARN Act.

www.nbcnews.com

Routine. The severance covers the notice period. California will fight for the $500/day penalty but it will likely go nowhere.

 

[amartinez1660]

I’m just quoting these so they’re all in one place where I can reference them later when Elon finally fails 😂

Not my circus not my monkey, not my battle not my bullets… but man would I love to fast forward and see the final score. Subscribed!

And I actually still think it can go either way as history has taught us that even criminals (and the worst of) have been rewarded for their bad behavior with all the fame, movies, signed deals, fan club following, become musicians, marry a rich person and whatnot.
Also the opposite example too.

 

[chrono1081]

I bet the ones that stay, work hard and excel will get VERY RICH

That's not how it works.

Generally what happens is they want the "rockstar" developers. Developers worth their salt know this is a keyword to run and never look back. People who don't know any better stay because they have delusions of grandeur and will burn out because of it.

The people staying will inherit a TON of work, lots of legacy stuff, lots of broken stuff that never had time to be completed, etc. Management is also going to expect new features, emergency fixes, and updates when new OSs come out. Management will still expect all of this to be handled without hiring anyone new because the people remaining are "rockstars".

Your days end up going from 8 hours a day to 12+ hours a day. You're not comped anything extra because "it's what you signed up for". You lose out on weekends and holidays because while everyone else is out enjoying the one life they have to live you are slaving away without the extra pay holding the product everyone uses work together with duct tape because there simply is too much work and not enough people to handle it.

The months roll on and your skills end up stagnating because all you're doing is patching/fixing/keeping things held together instead of learning anything new. You're tired, stressed, miserable because all you do is work for someone else dream. You're not any richer, your salary is the same but your quality of life is way down.

You're realizing this isn't what you thought it was and want to look for another job, but when? You work all the time. With what skills? They're stagnating and you can't pass a leetcode interview, nor do you have time to study for one. You're becoming trapped.

Again, people in IT worth their salt know that what Musk is doing is terrible and will get the hell out.

 

[tgwaste]

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.

They all got severance

 

[SnappleRumors]

Few days ago he said bankruptcy is the option. I don’t think he knows exactly what he wants to do with Twitter.

View attachment 2114709

Elon Musk warns Twitter could face bankruptcy as top executives flee

The company is losing $4 million a week as high-profile staffers resign, raising doubts that it can keep operating.

www.cbsnews.com

Not likely anytime soon as Musk would lose control of Twitter when entering BK.

 

[jdmachogg]

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.

He offered 3 months severance.

 

[tgwaste]

The sky is falling, the sky is falling! 😂
Lets check back in a year.

 

[PS8409]

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

I’m reminded of Steve Jobs’ work ethic. He pushed people to do the impossible so the impossible would happen. If he hadn’t, would there even be a MacRumors? Musk is purifying his work force to cultivate true talent in the company.

 

[robertosh]

The interesting part is that even with half of the work force the service runs pretty well … 🧐

 

[SnappleRumors]

The people who stay will be people who think they'd have a hard time finding another job. People with impeccable credentials and abilities will have no trouble finding a new job.

What do the following companies have in common?
Meta
Amazon
Lyft
Stripe
Salesforce
Microsoft
Robinhood
Coinbase
Cisco

 

[Will Co]

which ones are dead weight?

Firing from the hip, picking fights in public with your employees, never addressing 'town hall style' with the employees, no vision other than the words 'twitter 2.0', etc.

If Elon used the 3 months that he fought the purchase to wisely plan out his management team and assess employees and the roadmaps and prep HR for targeted firings (dead weight, mismatched skill sets, etc) and then explained twitter 2.0 to his company he would have employees motivated and willing to bust their butts.

This - and there's even a term for it. It's called "good leadership".

 

[VampyricGentleman]

In honesty I didn’t expect the takeover to end well. For those who are cheering for Musk, look at it as your own job. Would you stay in a firm that expected YOU to double your hours for no extra consideration? Sure we all put in hours here and there if our company is struggling but demanding you double your work. I’d run a mile.

Talking anecdotally I had a friend in tech who was told that he had to do an extra twenty hours a week unpaid. He walked and found something better. Whilst serving his notice he worked at 2/3rds speed so did the same work just had to put in the extra hours

 

[Red Oak]

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.

"Always be Firing. Always be Hiring" That is the only way

 

[averagenerd81]

What do the following companies have in common?
Meta
Amazon
Lyft
Stripe
Salesforce
Microsoft
Robinhood
Coinbase
Cisco

Microsoft shouldn't be in this list. They are actually doing really well and their layoffs were rumored quite low.

 

[averagenerd81]

In honesty I didn’t expect the takeover to end well. For those who are cheering for Musk, look at it as your own job. Would you stay in a firm that expected YOU to double your hours for no extra consideration? Sure we all put in hours here and there if our company is struggling but demanding you double your work. I’d run a mile.

Talking anecdotally I had a friend in tech who was told that he had to do an extra twenty hours a week unpaid. He walked and found something better. Whilst serving his notice he worked at 2/3rds speed so did the same work just had to put in the extra hours

This is what I don't get from people. If this happened to them they would be doing the same thing. Working yourself to death for a company is just foolish.

 

[JM]

Man the cult of Musk is really strong.

I smell a lazy whiner who doesn’t like to work. 🤔 😂

 

[TMRJIJ]

I’m just quoting these so they’re all in one place where I can reference them later when Elon finally fails 😂

I'll back you up on this.

 

[JM]

Given he expects and makes them do it at SpaceX, why on earth do you think he is just kidding about doing it a Twitter? Understand since they are salaried they don't get any more money, so he wants them to work twice as many hours for only the same amount of pay, and oh btw even before the 25% who were left exited the company today, given the 50% of employees he had already fired last week and 80% of the contractors he fired last weekedn, we have 3-4X the work with the much smaller staff, and almost a year to a day from his last thanksgiving post of SpaceX, about, need to work Thanksgiving or we go BANKRUPT!!! This year - Twitter employees get we need to double down with 25% of the staff left or we are going BANKRUPT!!!!. Gee that looks familiar. Most of the staff that is left have work visa or health care issues that prevent them from just quitting but the majority are going to be looking for new jobs. Elon is notorious for giving bad raises, and having some of the worst work-life balanced companies in the world, trying to run twitter with 1/3-1/4 of the people that it was running with only two weeks ago, all while being yelled at for not working a full 40 hours of unpaid overtime, its not a job a bunch of competent people are going to be signing up for and he doesn't even have the we are going to Mars lie to recruit people for Twitter.
-Tig

80 hour week at SpaceX? I’m curious what their salary is, then. If it’s high, well, sounds okay to me.

The employees are free to work somewhere else. I’m sure they would have no problem getting a job somewhere after working at Space-X (or Twitter for that matter… maybe… since the day in life video made it seem like it’s all fun and games and maybe one meeting during the day.)

no one is locked into working for Musk like a slave. It IS America. People are free to leave and find another job. And many people did choose to leave… and they will find other jobs.

The new boss came in and was clear about his expectations, and told people to leave if they don’t like it. People left. The people that remained know full well what they’re getting into, and there does exist in people the desire to do work for a “noble” cause like SpaceX and Twitter (which I don’t think so, but some do).

 

[rafark]

Not likely anytime soon as Musk would lose control of Twitter when entering BK.

Burger King?

 

[cardfan]

Hundreds of Twitter employees today resigned from the company rather than opting in to be part of "Twitter 2.0" under Elon Musk, according to The Verge. Musk earlier this week told workers that Twitter will be "extremely hardcore" going forward, with employees expected to put in long hours at high intensity. "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," he said.

Musk on Wednesday sent out a Google form and asked employees to respond "Yes" by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday if they wanted to stay at the company. Hundreds decided not to, and have said their goodbyes in Slack and on Twitter. Departing employees will receive a severance package.

When he took over Twitter, Musk laid off approximately half of the 7,500 employees that were at the company at the time, and since then, he has continued firing employees who have been critical of him, including longtime engineers.

Twitter employees that spoke to The Verge said that given the number of people that have left, Twitter could "start breaking soon" and that it will be "extremely hard for Twitter to recover."

With the exodus of employees, Twitter temporarily closed all office buildings and suspended badge access. According to Zoë Schiffer, Musk and his team are "terrified employees are going to sabotage the company."

In the final hours ahead of the deadline, Musk reportedly attempted to convince employees to stay. Bloomberg says that key staff were brought into meetings and Musk also walked back his in-office work demands. He had said that all employees needed to work from the office 40 hours a week, but today he said that working from home was allowed with monthly in-person meetings and managerial approval.

At the current time, Musk's first initiative is on pause as Twitter makes changes. Last week, Twitter introduced a more expensive $8 version of Twitter Blue that included a verification badge, and it turned out that debuting widespread verification led to account impersonation that impacted numerous companies.

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

Good to see happening. Twitter brought it on themselves.

 

[SnappleRumors]

Microsoft … layoffs were rumored quite low.

Companies who are currently laying off typically aren’t dragneting for new hires.

 

[SnappleRumors]

Burger King?

😂 You might want to stick to the Black Friday articles.

 

[VampyricGentleman]

This is what I don't get from people. If this happened to them they would be doing the same thing. Working yourself to death for a company is just foolish.

I’m a firm believer that you work to live, not live to work. What is the point of working all the hours and stacking up (where it’s paid) the extra money if you drop dead before you can enjoy it?