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

[Rogifan]

It is not an employer’s job to coddle their employees. Work or leave. It’s not a daycare.

There must be something in between toxic and coddling employees. A lot of the Musk defenders remind me of those who would defend any time there were stories of Steve Jobs being a jerk. I don’t understand why some people think being a jerk is a good leadership quality to have.

 

[aloysiusfreeman]

It is not an employer’s job to coddle their employees. Work or leave. It’s not a daycare.

No it's just the place people spend the majority of their waking lives.

 

[MacGekko]

Anyone remember this guy (and his controversial management style)?

Steve Jobs' Style: Everything We Know About Managing Is Wrong

Steve Jobs's Management Style: Abusive or Motivational?

Elon Musk not very different from Steve Jobs in firing employees

But nothing in that final article actually shows evidence that the layoffs ordered by Steve Jobs are remotely in line with the ones that Musk ordered, again, it is about strategy.

Here is the bottom line, Twitter exists because the elites in New York/DC/LA love it and use it, you lose them and the company is dead. One of the reasons Trump got elected was because he understood this, if Musk does not then he is going to fail.

 

[MacGekko]

Who worships Elon Musk?

Are you joking?

 

[MacGekko]

Just to be clear here I cannot stand Musk. But here is the reality a much smarter man than I once told me, EVERYONE is replaceable.

Including Musk.

 

[I7guy]

There must be something in between toxic and coddling employees. A lot of the Musk defenders remind me of those who would defend any time there were stories of Steve Jobs being a jerk. I don’t understand why some people think being a jerk is a good leadership quality to have.

When you own the place, like Musk, it’s irrelevant whether he’s a jerk…or not. People dont like it can leave….which they did in droves. Twitter will either succeed or fail.

 

[Realityck]

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.

I wonder if Elon understands what a hardcore employee is about?

Managing Performance of Hardcore Employee – Corporate Training With Live Music

When we mentioned hardcore to describe a person, that particular person is an intractable core or nucleus of a society, especially one that is stubbornly resistant to improvement or change. Hardcore personalities are hostile, abusive and intimidating. They always have to be right and will charge like angry bulls if you are challenge or cross them. When these people exist at workplace, it is always come with discipline and performance problem. Hardcore employees always think they are right, they are resisting changing.

I think most are tamer then what this article implies, that they are used to working at a company and can't really leave because they lack confidence, still is that the ideal employee to construct a Twitter 2.0?

 

[dampfnudel]

Musk continues his quest to hollow out Twitter. Maybe Zuckerberg will buy it once it becomes a bargain.

 

[jwdsail]

I'm pretty much checking in on twitter to try and keep track of where my favorite tech, MST3K, and motorsports people are going to end up when twitter goes bust at this point?

 

[MacGekko]

This is IF he can convince a bunch of deep pocketed advertisers to return to the platform and spend a fortune among all the hate speech etc. That’s a big IF.

Exactly, any sort of that type of speech and the company will be full of tumbleweeds, hate speech will relegate Twitter to snake oil ads.

 

[jwdsail]

I heard that Hardcore Twitter will only be available in the back of your local video store.

Thank you and good night y'all! Try the veal! Don't forget to tip your waitress!

 

[MacGekko]

I'm pretty much checking in on twitter to try and keep track of where my favorite tech, MST3K, and motorsports people are going to end up when twitter goes bust at this point?

It was nice to follow the last few elections with a list of data crunching pollster nerds, some journalist whose name escapes me created the list, it blew away any mainstream media election coverage, losing a resource like that will stink but I imagine if Twitter dies, another company will rise up to fill the void.

I see a lot of tweets touting Mastodon, I don't know, one look at it and I think the average user will want to run away, does not look user friendly at all.

 

[hooptyuber]

Is the crazed left in the room right now?

On this comment thread? Yes. How are things today?

 

[MacGekko]

what has he done that makes him a megalomaniac? Is it simply he does not share the same politic views? You don't like that he is actually make big broad changes to a company he paid $44 billion for that is not profitable? When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in '97 the fired 4,000 + people, axed projects in the work, all to turn it around and make it what it was under his leadership.

Did Steve Jobs make decisions that alienated the elite base of customers that purchased Apple products, did Steve Jobs have a strategic vision which included simplifying the product lines, did he identify people like Jony Ive, did he nurture the talented people or seek to undermine them, was it a meritocracy or a place where if you insulted Steve Jobs you would be immediately fired, context matters.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

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’m sure there were folks saying “Dorsey has got to go” with no thought to how things would go if he were I understand “Timmy has got to go” too.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

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.

I’m sure that Google’s rushing to fill the coming void with some form of RCS shenanigans! “C’MON folks, we actually have an idea about messaging, finally. After like 20 tries, we think we’ve hit on it. It’s basically ‘Twitter over RCS’ ”!

Please pay attention to us…

 

[Fyrus]

I think we are seeing you simply can completely change a platform, he owns it so he can direct it where he will. He could completely tank Twitter or he could come out with something better and send him higher in terms of network. When companies are bought, especially large companies, layoffs and the like are not uncommon. Maybe not to this magnitude, but that is his right as owner.

Ugh.. yes it is his right. Yet it doesn’t make it right.

I honestly couldn’t care less about Twitter, or any social media for that matter.

It’s weird to me that in the USA people can get fired so easily after working years for a company. That isn’t right.

 

[VampyricGentleman]

Looking in at this whole thing including the comments from users here from the outside (being in the UK and not having an active account on Twitter (Though I had planned to use it in 2023) Here are my observations that I haven’t made before on the feed.

Some people seem to think that Twitter is only for the USA, whilst I am sure it has most of it’s base (that isn’t bot farms) there many of us who use it (or would) from outside that country.

Freedom of speech whatever side of the political spectrum you come from is not free from repercussions.

Employees have rights under laws and if you let one billionaire tramps all over them, who is to stop your boss from doing the same to you? Nothing because precedent has been set.

For those who say suck it up, there are many bad bosses in the world. Yes there are but do we need more? I worked under several horrible bosses for 4 years. It nearly destroyed me because there was no one in the chain of command above me that was a good boss so they sided with the bad ones. I lost 28lb in weight, I became antisocial, lost about 75% of my hair and most of my outgoing nature. I finally got out into a better firm. Within 2 months my hair was growing back, I was gaining weight and I became social again. Some years on I’m in a job that pays better than most of the management team, is easier, I’m valued and respected. When I applied for this job, they didn’t even interview anyone else because they had heard of my work. Had I stayed in the old toxic work place I know I wouldn’t have had promotion because there was none available. They deliberately made ways to ensure I couldn’t get out (faked errors (for which I had evidence) in my work to put me on disciplinaries with sanctions that made it impossible to leave.). If you leave one bad boss run things, it’s going to spill out because others in and outside of the firm will think they can get away with it. Is that what you want your boss to be like?

 

[MacGekko]

I’m sure there were folks saying “Dorsey has got to go” with no thought to how things would go if he were I understand “Timmy has got to go” too.

Dorsey should have left a long time ago, he let Twitter stagnate for years, someone who understands media and news should be able to turn it into a profit juggernaut.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

To me, Musk is not the one coming off as unhinged in all of this, frankly.

Oh, to be sure he IS coming off as unhinged. He’s just not the ONLY one.

 

[cardfan]

I see why MR reports Twitter now. I don’t get the interest here but apparently people here love it. Maybe apple should’ve bought it instead lol

 

[JayKay514]

Everyone seems to think Musk has lost his mind. Let's keep in mind that this guy has led PayPal, Tesla, Starlink and others and has the yet-to-be things like Boring and Neural-something-or-other. He seems to find great people to execute on his ideas and I think he's doing that with Twitter now. I think in two years Twitter gets it's **** together and becomes more than it ever was.

1. Not at all. Confinity bought his similar payment company X.com, and the merged entity became PayPal, but Musk never worked there - he left in 2000 after the merger, but some sort of wording says he gets to call himself "co-founder."
2. Nope. He bought it, he didn't start it, then used stock tricks to stack the board with his own appointees, then forced out the actual founder Martin Eberhard, never paid him his agreed-upon severance, and when he delivered the agreed-upon "second off the line" Tesla Roadster to Eberhard, they gave him one that had been in a crash test and required at least 75 new parts to even be driveable. Eberhard sued him for libel because Musk went on to disparage him in dozens of interviews, and because he tried to rewrite history by calling himself the founder.
3. Everyone(1) - EVERYONE(2) - who works in urban planning(3) and transit design knows that the Boring Company tunnels are a pointless boondoggle, will make traffic worse (or at best, better for a very, very small subset of elite users), and enforce car dependency. Unless he invents actual teleportation, nothing he's doing there is revolutionary. He even admitted that he floated the Hyperloop idea so that California would delay putting in proper high-speed rail. The only way to move lots of people efficiently around the geometry of urban areas is mass transit - buses, light rail, trams / streetcars, metros / subways, and heavy rail. Solutions we've had for 200 years, that work great in places where they actually invest in infrastructure and making cities for people instead of cars.
4. He doesn't find people to execute on his ideas. He buys his way in and if he's smart, lets them keep working properly. However, from the many people who have worked with him, they say he's not actually very smart, tends to obsess over weird small details that derail projects, etc, and there are so many stories of harassment from employees - including accounts of racial segregation in Tesla factories - that it seems that those companies survive despite him, not because of him.
5. He's not really a genius - in fact he doesn't, in all likelihood, have an actual university degree. By all reports, he didn't study hard at all at Queen's when he studied business there, just partied and played video games; he sort-of studied economics at UPenn, and crucially, did not study physics at all, despite what he keeps telling everyone. He only seems to have a weird non-diploma diploma from UPenn that says "bachelor of arts" with no field of study on it. He never went to Stanford to do any postgraduate work in batteries, as he claims; when questioned, their records team can't find anything suggesting he attended or was accepted, much less that he got in to a PhD program in an unrelated field while his undergraduate degree wasn't even finished, and then dropped out before starting!
6. It's highly improbable that he thinks that by firing or alienating everyone who works at Twitter, including all the core teams, he is going to make Twitter profitable. His bizarre series of actions can be explained in two ways: He's having a really, really public midlife crisis, OR - and this is more likely, given the circles he travels in - he was given a lot of money by autocrats, oligarchs and anti-democratic groups to intentionally tank it, to stop grassroots organizing and instantaneous news communication.

And yet, there will always be Weird Nerds who will jump in front of the Shotgun of Valid Musk Criticism.

He's not gonna be your friend, bro.
You're not going to be a billionaire, either.
He was born rich and failed / bullied his way upwards. He's what happens when capitalism and ego runs unchecked. He is a cautionary tale, not someone to emulate.

 

[MacGekko]

Jobs was known for firing people left and right on a whim (however he supposedly never fired anyone the company actually needed). If you ended up in the elevator with him, he'd ask you "so what do you do" and if your answer was not satisfactory, you'd be unemployed by the time you reach your floor.

I would love that to know if that ever happened or something that an Aaron Sorkin type invented to stoke the legend.

 

[aloysiusfreeman]

Ugh.. yes it is his right. Yet it doesn’t make it right.

I honestly couldn’t care less about Twitter, or any social media for that matter.

It’s weird to me that in the USA people can get fired so easily after working years for a company. That isn’t right.

Labor rights and its public opinion has definitely waned, but since the pandemic there has been a resurgence that I can only hope doesn't lose steam.

It really should not be controversial for workers to have a voice at the place they spend most of their lives at.

 

[aloysiusfreeman]

1. Everyone(1) - EVERYONE(2) - who works in urban planning(3) and transit design knows that the Boring Company tunnels are a pointless boondoggle, will make traffic worse (or at best, better for a very, very small subset of elite users), and enforce car dependency. Unless he invents actual teleportation, nothing he's doing there is revolutionary. He even admitted that he floated the Hyperloop idea so that California would delay putting in proper high-speed rail. The only way to move lots of people efficiently around the geometry of urban areas is mass transit - buses, light rail, trams / streetcars, metros / subways, and heavy rail. Solutions we've had for 200 years, that work great in places where they actually invest in infrastructure and making cities for people instead of cars.

Personally felt that he should get the guillotine for this alone.