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Hundreds of Twitter Employees Leaving After Elon Musk's 'Extremely Hardcore' Work Demands
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Well I guess that’s the rub. IF anybody in MR was worth over $200B. Until that happens Musk, love him or hate him, is the one with the smarts who made the deal. I guess it’s similar to what MR posters said of Tim Cook…a monkey can run apple better.
yeah there is a lot of the same rinse and repeat stories from him. Looking at how vitriol he has in postings you would think he was an ex twitter employee. He seems kinda bitter....
We know that Musk knows what he is doing. The same person that invented Tesla...put people in space....implemented a satellite communication network has long term plans at work. We all might not know what his long terms goals are with Twitter......are or agree with his methods... But his track record speaks for itself.
Oh no Twitter is doomed! They fired the marketing guy! Where will they find another marketing guy? too bad he doesn't have other successful companies that have marketing people....oh wait.....
There is a very real possibility that due to Enron allowing the filth back on Twitter, apple and google may ban the app due to liability.
I believe the Truth Social app took quite a while to get on the Apple App Store? It was not until Truth Social provided proof of a workable moderation system?
Anyone remember?
I believe the Truth Social app took quite a while to get on the Apple App Store? It was not until Truth Social provided proof of a workable moderation system?
Anyone remember?
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“What a phone should be” is already a solved equation, though. An phone that starts with Whatsapp and Twitter at the right price could be an interesting proposition.
But by the time it gets to that point for his phantom phone. Twitter will be out of business.
I too wonder if he got a call from Apple and google that basically said as much.
Show us the moderation or we are going to pull your app till you do. It would explain tonight’s tantrum.
I too wonder if he got a call from Apple and google that basically said as much.
Show us the moderation or we are going to pull your app till you do. It would explain tonight’s tantrum.
I would love to see all of his business's go down. He is scum.
lol ... not sure what all those employees were for anyways. Possibly the fake "fact checking" and political bias. I'm sure Elon is trying to shake things up in order to retain actual talent, who can see longer-term and more clearly / critically. The ones who stick around, I'm sure will have the opportunity to be rewarded and integrate and play with some new technology.
Having plan B, C, or D ready to go isn’t nervousness. It’s good business.
Would you call Apple ‘Nervous’ because they are releasing phone features years after other companies have done so? Hardly.
I am so utterly shocked at how many people post here how bad of a boss Elon Musk is without mentioning Steve Jobs as one of similar nature that planted Apple on the map for good from near futility.
There are so many write ups on the whole Jobs legacy, but here is one with similar tones to the work balance life so many feel Elon is depriving Twitter employees of. Remember, Elon is giving everyone a heads up and a choice.
There are so many write ups on the whole Jobs legacy, but here is one with similar tones to the work balance life so many feel Elon is depriving Twitter employees of. Remember, Elon is giving everyone a heads up and a choice.
“Similar nature” and “exactly the same” are still two wildly different things, though, especially in this case. There are far more ways that they’re different than the same.
Of course it has twice the traffic. If you pack a plane with glitter and crash it into the ground at high speed, it's not a surprise when a lot of people want to watch.
Anyway, I suspect that Twitter 2.0 will eventually be a success (by Musk's own definition of a success).
Even though Musk obviously has no clue what he's doing, he'll just keep throwing things at the wall until something sticks and he finds a way to generate income. He's got deep pockets, and it doesn't bother him how many employees get hurt along the way.
It will eventually settle down and find a niche as the go-to place for hate speech and misinformation.
The things is even if you are a hard worker who is good at your job what is Musk doing to entice you to stay at Twitter? It doesn’t feel like a great proposition. I’m a salary worker and work extra hours because I want to but if someone was demanding I did and acting like a turd it I would be much less inclined to do so.
If you do fall in that bracket you will have offers and command your worth elsewhere so if he fires all the dross and the cream move elsewhere who exactly is going to work at twitter?
There you go more mis-information, Elon Musk did not invent Tesla, nor started it, named it, etc. Same with Paypal and others. You really come across like a positive mouth piece. And that is what Elon is good at, rewriting history, making people believe it is all him, and follow him along to his next venture/disaster. Granted it worked out very well for him personally so far. The bubble will burst one day as too many are just way overvalued...
Exactly let's assume and kid ourselves that the best of the best stayed and were cheering Elon to finally get rid of all their slacking colleagues and friends (yeah right). Let's imagine this is true. Let's imagine the best of the best stays around and keeps seeing whole teams disappear, the processes gone and the check and balance are gone. Let's imagine the best of the best convinced Elon that some needed to come back, and then witnessed those who they asked to come back be fired again but this time on reduced terms.
Let's imagine those were the best of the best, and let's imagine they still stayed there. I say again let's imagine those were the best of the best. No I don't think so.
And now no company in the world would want to touch those employees that hang around that long.
Someone please seriously give a real good answer to these questions …. Why care what happens to Twitter? Why care what a billionaire does with his money? Would you be reacting the same if it was Facebook? I mean everyone agrees social media has done more harm than good overall. So what if Elon drives it in to the ground? It’s his money he can light it all on fire if he wants too. How would it really affect you personally if he did? 1000 posts arguing about what? There are more important issues in this world folks.
I made a bullet point list of all the problems which Twitter is facing right now, with this information coming from multiple sources from within Twitter. You called them "assumptions", basically minimised them and expected me to prove it.
So then you make make an even wilder statement that Twitter has "doubled its traffic" since the Musk buyout, it turns our it's sourced from within Twitter and rather than you holding yourself to the same standard, you essentially tell me to disprove your statement. *sign* This is a huge double standard.
Sure, it was meant to be done to "shake things up" but it was done in Musks usual impulsive "react first, think later and clean up the mess" way. And changing the business culture as fast as possible is the worst thing you can do. The frog needs to be cooked slowly.
Just to give some background, I have worked in very large (10 of thousands of hosts), enterprise IT infrastructure environments for 20 years in companies of all sizes. My career followed the technology; first from bare metal servers, through to virtualisation in the late 00s, and finally to the current abstraction layer - "cloud". During this time I also moved into senior Operations Management roles managing numerous DevOps teams managing significant AWS resources which underpin critical SaaS solutions - obviously not at the scale of Twitter, but I understand the enterprise-scale technology and job markets in these areas very well.
I have been involved numerous mergers and acquisitions during my time, participating both as the acquired company and also working in the role to perform post-acquisition integration of people and all physical/digital assets, resources and IP.
Now of course, when a takeover occurs, the entity (company, person) taking over always has a bias towards thinking that the acquired company must be grotesquely over resourced. This is almost always partly true but also part arrogance on the part of the incoming CEO ("Of course no one could run a company as efficiently as me"). This is why redundancies are basically expected regardless of circumstance or outcome.
Here is a structured corporate strategy to drastically reduce a workforce in a similar time frame to Musk without all of the negative outcomes:
- For a good part of this process, secrecy is absolutely imperative. Bring in a number of trusted individuals who are highly skilled in business analysis, communication, and however many subject matter experts (SMEs) you need to provide advice and assessment of all the technical niches in the company.
- First, perform a financial analysis of what the ideal head count is or budget for employees looks like - this will help you drive the rest of the progress in an organised fashion and will set clear success/failure criteria.
- Benchmark every employee's current salary to determine if they are below, at or above industry standard for their role in their particularly geographical location.
- The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) should be consulted when trying to reduce the HR foot print of the organisation in the most extreme examples such as what happened to Twitter where you expect entire role categories or departments to be destroyed. This document outlines for every role/function in the company, how long the company can correctly function without a role type (hours, days, weeks, months etc) before major risks or incidents may arise if these roles are reduced below a critical threshold.
- Based on the BCP, create a role vs weighted risk matrix to identify the roles and/or departments which can be made redundant whilst creating the least operational risk. Complete this analysis for the entire organisation whilst aiming for your success/failure criteria for savings defined earlier.
- You now understand your target HR budget, you know the most critical roles for business continuity, the individual salary benchmarks, and the relatives risks based on roles. You can now begin your cull.
- First, An innocuous sounding communication to all employees needs to be crafted by the external experts you bought in but sent out by the trusted internal comms staff, detailing that company profitability is problematic and management is considering all ways in which the company can meet financial requirements (setting soft expectations in the company employees that a cull will occur).
- First cull model to implement is Last-in-First-out (LiFO). The newest members of the company have the least organisational experience, will not be fully contributing yet, generally have the least rights under employment law and represent the least risk of them being exposed to sensitive IP. They are also the least likely to have established strong relationships in the company which might negatively impact culture and will appear as "fair" to the longer tenured employees.
- Second cull - Get rid of many of the middle managers, except those which previous analysis has determined to be critical. These managers are most likely to promote the agendas and culture of the previous executives, have disproportionately high pay and provide you with the next opportunity;
- Using previous performance and peer reviews, promote the highest performing and best paid team leaders to replace these outgoing middle managers. These new managers will have the respect of their teams and you will not need to raise their salary to anywhere near what the previous middle managers were consuming. Then replace all these team leads by promoting the highest performing team members to team leads to replace their upwardly-mobile colleagues.
- Next, send out a secondary communication to all employees again crafted by the external experts you bought in but sent out by the trusted internal comms staff, detailing that due company profitability, a number of new staff members and middle managers have been let go. Emphasise all the internal promotions you have made to replace them, from team leads and all the team members who are now newly minted team leads. Hurrah!!
- Now, the major cull. Based on performance reviews, cull an many low-mid performing employees from ALL departments in ALL Business Units up to a number still within acceptable BCP thresholds, having your newly promoted team leaders and middle management perform the actual dismissal of those former colleagues they had been carrying as dead weight for ages. This will demonstrate loyalty to the new vision. (except for teams such as HR, PR/comms, recruitment and legal which are critical to this process).
- Now you involve your new mid level managers and team leaders in the communications to let their teams know of the difficult decision THEY have had to make by removing all their low performing colleagues from the teams whilst emphasising those left are the absolute best. The team members will respect and trust their former teammates.
- Have HR, legal and finance complete all the documentation and severance payments and gag orders etc for all those made redundant.
- Once complete, cull finance, legal, HR, PR, admin etc of all but the very highest performers.
- DON'T let your new CEO issue ultimatums about all the extra work the staff have to do. This above process has retained all the highest performing employees, who are generally the most engaged. Give them intellectually interesting projects to work on and they will work their own asses off. TELLING them to do this will create the opposite impulse
This optimal method can be completed within a month or two and has ensured the following has occurred (instead of the impulsive, undirected, potentially illegal, PR nightmare it actually was):
- It has been done in an orderly way, with clearly defined financial goals set.
- It is done privately and not in the public spotlight.
- The BCP analyses done has ensured that the organisational risk has been minimised based on the people selected to go (and that the wrong people haven't been fired and embarrassingly rehired PUBLICLY)
- There has been effective communication and updates to the company from their trusted comms staff, minimising confusion, gaining trust.
- Middle managers, most likely to be sticklers for previous culture and process are removed. these are also most likely to be the most disliked employees.
- New leadership has promoted high performing Team Leaders into these middle management roles, who would be very popular and trusted with their previous team members.
- New leadership has promoted high performing team members to replace these upwardly mobile former Team Leaders.
- Morale is boosted by the announcement of all these promotions
- Significant amounts of team members across all business units have been booted by the new middle managers and team leaders, effectively making them accomplices and invested in the new vision
- Once their usefulness has expired, all low performing ancillary staff are booted from HR, PR, Legal, Admin etc.
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I don't care really about Twitter as a platform, something else will popup. But until then it does provide reach and engagement for a large number of business and people. It was good to see the toxicity been weeded out, it is terrible to see those participants being given a platform to spout their hatred again.
I don't care what he does with his money, that is down to him. However him driving it in the ground does impact others, takes away income from other people, and I'm pretty sure provided a traumatic impact to a lot of people who worked at twitter. Him I don't care about, the impact on others, yes I'm not sorry to say I have empathy.
And ironically social media platforms like twitter have helped focus on more important issues in this world, it is a tool. So no I don't agree at all that social media has done more harm than good overall.
Do you know what the lag time is from an employee being immediately "disappeared" from the company like so many Twitters employees have been and to having a fully contributing replacement??
Take a guess for a role like a infrastructure (DevOps) engineer or an experienced software developer?
For the types of roles working on pretty industry standard things, it's probably about 6 months of lost productivity. For more Twitter-specific processes and tech niches the time just goes up from there.
1. Yes, after what has gone on recently and the way he has conducted himself and the absolutely inhumane and disgusting way he has treated Twitter employees in a completely public manner, he will have difficulty attracting and especially retaining top talent.
In my experience, the really top tier talent will work for 3 main considerations; high salary, ground-breaking work, amazing culture and benefits. They usually hope to get 2 out of 3.
Ground-breaking Work
We know that nothing being done at Twitter is ground-breaking nor that anything world changing will come out the company. Top talent will work for a relatively low salary if they can be apart of organisations like Apple in the early 80s or late 90s, HP in the 60s, Google in the mid-late 00s, SpaceX now etc, you get the point. This will never be twitter.
Culture & Benefits
Social events, free amenities such as provided breakfast and lunch, free gym memberships, extra days off for personal development, access to counsellors, Friday in-office drinks, things offered by places such as Atlassian, Google certain Microsoft campuses. I'm not sure where Twitter previously sat here but I can tell you the "culture" aspect was killed in one instant and if there were benefits, I'm sure they will follow as a cost saving exercise".
High Salary
I think the only realistic tool he has left to attract top-tier talent to Twitter is salary. Even then I wonder if he is too tight to take this approach. But once you factor in the colossal mess in the other 2 areas, I don't think this will be enough, It's also the most fickle of the 3 and the easiest one for other companies to head hunt through your organisation if your employees only allegiance is to money. It's a very superficial motivator and not a lot of job satisfaction is derived from it.
2. Even if he wanted to immediately hire back a lot of the roles he fired, it would take a substantial amount of time as a lot of the support staff for the recruiting process are gone, then once they hire someone in a specialist developer or DevOps Engineering role, it's at least 6 months post hire to see them become full productive team members.
I think will take at a MINIMUM 18 months to get all the right people back into the necessary roles and that's assuming nothing else goes wrong for him.
3. I made comments or even implied anything around Twitter's long term viability. If I HAD to guess, I think we'll see more issues and controversy and eventually Musk will become "bored" of his new toy and it will be sold off within the next 5 years at a significant markdown.
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I dont have any skin in the twitter game (not a user, employee, shareholder, director etc), but it’s interesting to see MR posters telling one of the richest people in the world “you’re taking it over wrong.”
It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. If this is Elon’s $44B test tube experiment, more power to him.
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