There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors.
Personally, I am sad about these layoffs. Even if there are many many lazy Twitter engineers hanging out on the roof, it's still sad to see people treated so poorly. Elon just treats people with such disgust. I have seen the inside of companies like Twitter, and usually people check out because leadership fails to set any direction. An engineer joins, tries to get some things done, and then finds that they cannot within the company's structure. That engineer will give up and be "unproductive" for the rest of the time their. Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. Instead, he immediately forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature, and cuts people ASAP in the most malicious way he could.
I am really disgusted by this brand of "leadership," and it's hard to reconcile this with someone I'd like to respect for bringing electric cars to the masses, and the U.S. back into the space race. I feel deeply sorry for the Twitter engineers who are being squeezed for no purpose but selfishness and meanness, and I hope it doesn't spread through the industry.
We can be compassionate about the folks getting laid off while still realizing that the company was grossly inefficient and needed to restructure -- these are not contradictory feelings. For me personally, I have no idea what "technology and development pace" these layoffs even could effect, as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it.
Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.
> as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it.
You underestimate the effort it takes to keep a service as large as Twitter running. Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security, inevitable technological break-age, deprecated dependencies, operations, root-causing failures, migrations (you can't avoid hardware migrations; hardware will die out), planning fallacy, etc, etc.
Yes it's incredible to see so many people on _hacker news_ who don't understand how much work it is to keep even moderately large (low millions of users) services running.
Yes, and repeatedly people point out that high dozens or low hundreds should be enough but they have thousands (allegedly).
I think the point you are missing that especially tech people might have been using twitter for 10 years like a public IRC client. Open App/Browser, read messages, write messages, complain about lack of linear timeline, close app.
Yes, it has grown, but they added a million features that probably none of the people here asked for. We don't necessarily follow Justin Bieber where the system needs to be able to handle 2m users connected, we follow a kernel developer with 2000 followers.
I guess it's a marvel of engineering that's mostly needed for whatever method they found to make money off, I'm still asking myself this after these years.
"Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes."
Firing incompetent people might improve things, not make them worse.
One of the reasons I was looking forward to the trial was to hear what (if any) communication between Mudge and Elon('s team) had been dredged up in discovery.
People also underestimate what it takes to keep advertisers happy. It might take a whole team just to manage one big account, and that account will cover the cost of the staff. With Elon threatening to fire half the company, it's no wonder brands are pulling out/pausing with no way to know who will be handling their accounts. A General Mills or Audi wants to keep working with the people it's come to trust over the years, not wonder if this new CEO is going to hand them off to some intern who just graduated with a major in advertising.
Ironically, I think Twitter started actually building product for the first time in a long time recently.
One frame through which you could view Twitter is it was the place where famous / popular / important (athletes, movie stars, government officials) talk to the public. Spaces, enabling audio conversations for those people, makes tons of sense.
So also Twitter Blue letting you read certain news w/o a paywall. If you're a serious consumer of news on Twitter, wsj/nyt/wapo/latimes/ft probably cost $1500/year. If the economics worked for the news orgs, there was huge value there.
Of course, they really sat on the product for 5+ years, so oof...
> There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer.
Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about. Not about Elon's policies ruining Twitter or whatever; that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is: what happens if Elon lays off 50% of Twitter, and a year later it turns from a floundering social media company that's not doing anything with its dominant market share into a profitable adtech powerhouse that rivals Meta and Google? If that happens, then your company's CEO is going to be laying off 50% of staff, too.
Completely agree. Elon is so worshipped that just him doing this has already emboldened the financial analysts and wannabe founder types to more ruthlessly question total comp numbers and hiring. Everyone who works in technology should be worried. Whether it’s correct or not, what looks like waste and excess to the business class who are used to the “hard facts” of balance sheets could look to someone else like one of the few labor sectors on the planet where workers are paid something near what they are worth. Silicon Valley is the land of fat peasants. This is the beginning of the lords and ladies tightening the peasant’s belts.
Is that really still the case? Most of the time I read something about Elon the comment section is very negative, compared to some years ago and it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore.
Nobody worshipped him anyway.
Musk is openly against some major progressive liberal and left viewpoints. And he is an awkward impulsive super billionaire. So naturally there is a sour crowd here.
I'm not worried. I've lived out what happens when activist investor know-it-all types come in and gut a company thinking they and their sycophant yes-men are smarter than everyone that came before. That isn't to say that Elon can't improve twitter as a business, but most CEOs aren't Elon, and even Elon is more hot air than substance.
You’re being downvoted at the moment, but if that timeline plays out I can definitely see copycat behavior in smaller companies, especially among the hustle culture bros.
So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him when the discussions were ongoing?
Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile.
And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.
> So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him
I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.
I can't speak for "the left", but he went from someone I respected for his contributions to... not that, not because of his views on free speech, but because he started publicly acting like an asshole on a regular basis.
Is firing people for dunking on their CEO what passes for free speech now? Or do you mean firing people for having different political opinions from the CEO?
> Elon has gone from being the hero of the left to the villain for daring to allow free speech.
I don't know if Elon Musk was ever "the hero of the left", or any tech executive for that matter? He definitely has his fans (among techies mostly), but you would be hard pressed for any hardcore leftist to see a CEO as their hero. The whole pedo thai diver incident turn even many left-leaning (and unaligned, and right-leaning) techies from pro to neutral or even negative.
Nobody in the comment chain was talking about left-wing vs. right-wing ideology. I get that Musk is a partisan figure now, but this thread isn't going to get any better by turning it into yet another ideological battle.
Freedom of speech is tough, huh? And in the USA it doesn't protect against promoting threats of violence. Seeing as the N word is probably considered the most hateful word in the English language, I can see it being understandably considered violent in many cases.
It is absolutely not literally violence to say or call someone the N word, no matter how repugnant or socially unacceptable it is. It is not illegal in the US to call people horrible names, nor is it illegal to be racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.
This isn’t to say I advocate for people being any of those things, it’s just somehow become generally accepted that these things are somehow inherently breaking the law or some kind of hate crime. Even on the rare instance someone displays some racist material in public, the news is quick to say police are investigating…investigating what, exactly? “Hate speech” is not a crime in the US.
If large chunks of the employee base are talking smack about the possible new CEO, perhaps there are reasons they are doing so? "Elon comes in and throws the company into chaos" seems to be fairly accurate, FWIW.
That is true, at least if you trust leaked discussions, however, this isn't an isolated example of Elon's leadership in action. All the points about the ideological captivity of Twitter employees are secondary to repeated behavior.
So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.
It's been clear for a while that Twitter only has the presence it has because it was the first out of the gate and not because they're actually good at what they do. Their talents seem to largely be the ability to amplify the most toxic aspects of both the left and the right at the same time.
I guess an implicit questions is: Can you teach old dogs new tricks?
Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared.
Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?
Many companies are moving to four day work weeks. Productivity peaks at under 50 hours per week. Silicon Valley humans are not immune to this just because they work in big tech.
Anyone who focuses purely on hours worked or misery while working is merely perpetuating this country's unhealthy Protestant style relationship with work. If an employee can be fully productive to the demands of their work and still have time to chat or go to the gym, what is the issue? You act like you've just described the worst thing you've ever seen ("spoiled apples") but I just see a happy workforce.
Of course, if they are truly not productive, that's something different. But unless they are your reports, you have no idea what their true level of productivity is.
It's beyond time we start recognizing that happy employees are more productive, and stop shaming people for daring to seem happy at work. Because right now, a lot of us seem like the proverbial crab not letting others crawl out of the bucket.
The owner wants to cut the fat. He's finding it. Yeah, he'll take out some muscle here and there, but were they overstaffed, could they do with less? Yes and yes. In a down market you don't survive by running things bloated especially when you have not been consistently profitable. He's not running a ClubMed charity.
Not a single part of what you criticised is inherently unreasonable. It entirely depends on the quality of the work done, and the overwhelming majority of people do not use anything close to an 8 hour workday to get stuff done. 4-5 at most.
I agree that 3-4 hours of productivity is all you're gonna get. Many people could be done without though. Some are a burden than help. He can run the co on 50% current staff easily, 25% is a bit bare bones, but doable.
I wish that were true. I've seen it in person (of course, this is not representative of every team every day --but it also occurs).
This isn't a knock on you. This is a knock on people who are parasitic to a company. Look, people cargo culted the SGI&Sun ethos and said, aha, they know! Let's follow. But these places are no longer the cult of engineers, it's the cult of MBAs and biz-dev types who if they were not in tech would be doing similar useless things at investment banking firms.
These are the kinds of people who balloon spending: we had this and that at [FANG] Let's get this that and the other here without knowing why we had it there and whether or not it make sense here, but, hey, you hired me, so let me have what I know -no, I don't want this viable alternative, that's not what the cool kids at FANG used, eeewww!
All? No. Obviously he'll be keeping a bunch and obviously some key people are productive. But, look, what are new revenue streams and features added in the last 5 years? One hand's digits can enumerate them.
I don't see how you can infer anything at all from that video. It's not like she's going to show her screen while she's typing away at an email (I hope it's obvious why...). There's also no timestamps, so the video says nothing about how much time is spent slacking off vs working. The video snippets probably only accounted for 2 hours of her day (at most). That doesn't seem super wasteful to me. If your impression is that "smoothie and wine on tap = slacking off", I think that's your misconception to correct.
That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.
I've had that sort of schedule, except for me it was more like leave early to catch a movie (happily that coincided with the summer that Moviepass was big).
Would be interesting to see how Elon's own schedule looks like. And no not his PR enabled one.
Would love to understand how he finds time to meme post almost every hour and handles all the insane context switching from managing 4/5 companies at a time.
This brand of leadership is how you end up with companies like SpaceX being able to build a Raptor engine per day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918) and Tesla advancing the electric car industry by many years. Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity.
Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness.
I'm going to call B.S. on this one. with SpaceX and Tesla, many employees are driven by a sense of purpose independent of the behavior of their shared/part-time CEO based on the fundamental mission of the company. In Twitter's case, I doubt the notion of whipping engineers to making more advertising revenue via blue check marks is going to rouse a sense of pride, purpose, or productivity. I guess we'll see!
Elon sees twitter as artificial brain made of humans (each user is a neuron). So i assume he has more ideas what to do with twitter than to just add paid blue marker.
That clip resonates strongly with me. I’ve seen exactly the good and bad scenarios he describes there in orgs for the reasons outlined.
I think that’s why Apple created so many iconic products under Jobs. You hear stories of Steve using the product and seeing a minor flaw and just flying off the handle that it’s not good enough, for the type of bug you know would have been a “priority 2 - won’t fix” in most large orgs on a product the CEO will never even use.
A “big hammer” who cares about the product can make a huge difference.
That's an interesting clip and reminiscent of an extremely effective manager I had. He would remove people from trouble projects one at a time to (a) reduce cost and (b) reduce meetings. The worst case project would have the single best engineer left on it.
I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.
> Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivityNow we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity.
SpaceX has higher headcount and less revenue than Twitter. Despite the long hours and hazardous working environment they are dramatically less productive than the lazy woke Twitter employees.
> He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up.
True. He could have. In the meanwhile, he has signed Twitter up for massive amounts of loans whose annual interest exceeds the company's annual free cash flow. I am not up to speed with all of Twitter's finances, but this right here might be one of the fastest way to grow the free cash flow without affecting the core revenue stream of the ad business.
I don't think this would be an act of leadership if it comes to pass. This is just a consequence of the straitjacket that Elon has put Twitter in. Sometimes, constraints help. Let's see what these financial conditions do for Twitter.
> I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors.
Except it won't take effect immediately. It's not like Twitter will only load 50% of the pages or it will be 2x slower the day the layoffs kick in.
I think the main hypothesis is that Twitter will have an S-curve decline.
Since so much work in a large org is communication, if they're able to do layoffs effectively and actually cut out the least productive people - 50% could take a while to have any visible external impacts.
That's my guess at least.
Sad for the people that lost good jobs, but I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.
There's a sense in which leaders don't actually make decisions, just tell people what's already happening.
From one perspective Elon is doing what Zuck doesn't have the balls to pull off. The product is mature, has passed peak enthusiasm already, time to stop growing+exploring, and start battening down the hatches?
The major threat to Twitter right now is twofold: that (1) the mild user downturn it’s been experiencing since 2020 turns into a full-on death spiral, and (2) other social networks step in and pull a TikTok by gobbling up Twitter’s users. Both of these things could probably be averted by smart new leadership. Neither of these things is helped by loading the company up with debt and moving into layoff/cash extraction mode to service it.
I think Elon treats _human labor_ with disgust, not just assembly line crew but also in high tech labor. Likely he believes a significant percentage of the employed talent pool is waste at a company like Twitter (and probably many others), by showering a smaller group of heavy hitters with more money he could be more nimble in ways he is with SpaceX, maybe even Tesla.
Firing 50% is not disgusting or malicious if the company is 50% overstaffed and losing money. It's acknowledging reality.
Letting people coast by in jobs they've given up on is not compassionate. Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too. I see a lot of people lamenting how the greatest minds of our generation have been stuck in big tech golden handcuffs putting eyeballs on ads. Well, this is what the fix looks like!
It's unfortunate that it's happening in a downturn but it's not Musk's fault that the economy started tanking during the acquisition.
How do you identify the right 50% in the short time Musk had?
He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way.
I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role.
It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire.
It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all.
I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.
The answer is it's not really possible to do a much better job. With unlimited time the result would not be that much more fair or effective. Firing the bottom 50% is impossible even with unlimited time to think about it. Employee performance evaluation isn't very effective, and Musk has no reason to trust Twitter's previous performance evaluations, and forcing people to work 6 months under a new performance evaluation process with the threat of a 50% layoff over their heads is not compassionate either, nor would it have a much better result at the end anyway. There is no silver bullet. Better to rip off the band-aid in one go.
You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.
Generally agree with the perception part, except that if the employee sees their better performing team members get fired and the worst ones stay, they might be almost as unhappy as if they were fired themselves.
> Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too
Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.
> Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership?
Absolutely yes. The sort of high performing people who join places like SpaceX and Tesla need very very little pressure to get them to work at full speed. Usually it just takes a nudge here and there, and they'll work themselves like crazy. The extra pressure on top is pure stress, and causes people to narrow their thinking and make mistakes.
The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards. Elon has these qualities for sure, and he could do away with the overstressing of his employees and would still be just as successful. Happy employees are productive. This was obvious in the early days of many startups, with Google as the prime example, but now the copycats will think that treating people as disposable is how to be successful like Elon.
As far as I can tell, the context here is that Elon is firing lots of people who are apparently not productive despite being in their position for years.
You are making it sound like Elon is the type of person who always pesters people and attempts to micromanage them to squeeze every ounce of "productivity" juice he can get out of the forcefully.
But obviously if that was his style, Tesla and SpaceX would never take off.
> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.
Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.
> You are making it sound like Elon is the type of person who always pesters people and attempts to micromanage them to squeeze every ounce of "productivity" juice he can get out of the forcefully.
This is exactly what I hear 2nd hand. His workplaces are miserable to be in because of extreme micromanagement, and expectations of long hours despite the personal and health cost to his employees.
>> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.
>
> Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.
Yes, but he mixes these good leadership qualities with pointlessly bad leadership qualities. He has high standards for the quality of the work (good), but he combines it with high standards for how unhappy you have to be while doing it (not good).
I'm not debating that Elon is successful and effective--it's obvious that he is. However, on top of being effective he just chooses to treat people like shit.
There was significant room for slack, he simply pushed growth over stability.
Reusable rockets and Starlink for example are extremely expensive investments that paid off, but SpaceX didn’t need them to prosper. Tesla’s stability suffered from continuous expansion of manufacturing requiring continues investment as well as Self Driving and other R&D investments which weren’t actually needed.
Which isn’t to say these where poor investments, but pushing the envelope simply increases risk.
Musk undeniably made these things happen sooner than they otherwise would have done. I would argue though, at least in terms of his public persona, this sort of abrasiveness has intensified significantly since those accomplishments. So yes, I think it is possible.
It is a large scale restructuring under new management. I'm sure the goal is to try to get this layoff phase done as quickly as possible to establish a new structure with the remaining employees.
I'm optimistic for Twitter's future. I thought it had stagnated long ago, but I'm intrigued now.
I don't know. It's not good that people are getting treated poorly - if anything, twitter should take more responsibility here. But if it's really "lazy developers" then maybe it's better if they work somewhere else and increase value for our society. Maybe some of them just went to twitter for the name and compensation but don't like to work for a corporate (like me for example). It's probably better for everyone if they go somewhere where they are happier and more productive.
I think it’s a good lesson for people picking companies. In the honeymoon phase of tech, the mythology created was that these elite startups have the type of culture where the boss is a revolutionary, you pick your own hours, beer and food, company outings, meaningful work, prestige, unlimited vacation, etc.
Well the truth is when you walk into a company that hires people for a quarter million dollars at scale, you are truly a number on a spreadsheet. The only way you can cut budget on 500 engineers at that price is not by firing Bob the underperformer, but instead 1/5 or 2/5 of that entire staff.
It should make you wonder what is that leetcode for? You are not that important or expensive in the backroom of some enterprise or medium sized business to be slashed like that. But when you are part of a 50 million dollar budget, bet your ass you have a 50/50 chance of being part of that 25 million the company suddenly wants to save.
The underperformer stuff has nothing to do with it.
I don't like Elon either, but he didn't make the decision to hire those people and it's not really fair to blame him now that they need to be fired. If twitter had 100k headcount, would you still say he should have delayed a layoff and given people a chance?
Unfortunately, regardless of what one wished to do, the economics of this deal and the amount of debt means that there is a very short leash. The layoffs are a way to extend that leash.
Elon is likely secretive Trump supporter. Over the years I noticed a lot of his thinking align with Trump. This take over is very expected when Twitter banned Trump. I was expecting something significant happening to twitter during Biden years. Lucky guess.
I mean he single handedly pulled the future forward in two different industries so far. Just because he is not "well adjusted" on twitter doesn't mean he cannot get shit done.
Single-handedly is when Louis Slotin improved nuclear research safety for all time with the consequence of his failed screwdriver stunt.
What Tesla and SpaceX have done are enormous human undertakings. He did not single-handedly do it by any rational interpretation. The delusional self-confidence he used to get investors to pay for those undertakings is what's about to destroy Twitter.
I think it's obvious that Elon Musk didn't single handedly pull the future forward. He cannot do this without his employees, especially since we know SpaceX is actually mostly ran by the COO Gwyne Shotwell.
Not referring to him as a semi god. Merely stating he has done what one would consider the realms of governments in the past. And one could only do that with a brash non rule following attitude. He went to Russia to buy an ICBM for God's sake. So if anyone can turn twitter around, it's him.
Exactly what "A-players" do you think want to be a part of this shitshow? This isn't building electric cars or rockets, where the cutting-edge engineering work might make up for having to work with someone like Musk. Trying to figure out how to monetize a shitty, declining social network is a whole other kind of problem, and not one that I'm sure justifies a chaotic, toxic workplace run by a notoriously unstable psychopath.
Anecdotal, but I spend a lot of time on a lot of tech forums, and the vastly prevailing opinion among the folks there is "I wouldn't work at Twitter right now for any amount of money."
It’s like HN discounts all his other successes and can’t believe he can attract high performing employees. He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting so it’s not a stretch to think he can flip Twitter back to an IPO quickly.
Its not luke hyperloop and the boring comosny were major failures and he was late for every deadline he has ever set.
Past performance does indicate future success. Nothing about this twitter story, from waving due dilligence, to trying to pull of a signed deal, to treatnent of employees, indicates competent management
> He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting
Right but that isn't the problem here, Twitter already solved that. What they haven't been able to do is make a short-form blog posting service that's profitable. Everything Musk has announced so far suggests he doesn't really understand how to change that.
he is going to change ut from unprofitable to disasterous. Have you seen the interest payment that must be serviced on that loan? The whole enterprise is dead, you just dont know it yet
Culture presents much harder problems than science when it comes to social media. Though I agree it’s not a stretch to think he can add Twitter to his successes.
The way this entire thing has been run is a f*cking disgrace. Yes they have a business to run. Yes they need to do what they need to do to keep things healthy on that end, but these are PEOPLE we are talking about here. They have lives and families. The amount of contempt I have for Musk over the way he is treating them is unbounded. We used to think this guy was Bruce Wayne. Turns out he's Lex Luthor.
Layoffs are part of business yes (pretty much what I said in my parent post). What I have a problem with is the way this is being done. Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office? Asking devs to print up their code? All this because he doesn't want to pay severance etc. I think that is hella f*cked up.
I've slept at work plenty of times. It's fun! Except one time I went outside for a spliff break at 2am and dropped my wallet w/ key badge right as the door shut. I had to hunt down a taxi and promise him I had money at my house! I also didn't have shoes on for some reason.
Your original comment made it sound like businesses shouldn't layoff people because they were people who had real lives. After reading this follow-up, I realized you have no issues with layoffs, but you actually just had an issue with how they were laid off. Basically, same outcome, but with more grace.
It’s not the same outcome at all - severance pay is often the difference between needing to take out a loan or not when embarking on a job search after a layoff. Lack of that stability will have material impact on many people: they might have to move, change which schools their kids go to, avoid medical treatment not covered by Medicare, etc etc. He’s not committing some sort of victimless crime.
I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.
Forcing people to work over weekends, 84 hour weeks, finding any excuse to make them quit or fire them "for cause" like making them print their code out physically? The end of the year is coming. It's supposed to be the holidays soon. Thanksgiving is in like 3 weeks. C'mon, dude.
Lex Luthor would never make so many stupid comments on social media. Musk is more cartoon villain than comic book villain. But I think the Joker once lampshaded that a CEO was more evil than he would ever be. Its probably somewhere in the Even Evil has Standards trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...).
He hasn’t communicated with the employees. He has left them twisting in the wind. They’re finding things out from his tweets instead of through proper company channels. It’s unprofessional and disrespectful.
I don't think you should diminish the great work of Lex Luther by associating Musk with him. Musk is not a genius, he just got rich with first mover advantage in Online banking (paypal) and disrupting a lazy industry (Cars but electric!).
The real measure of Musk will be seeing how well this all goes. If he's really is smart, this may work. But by all accounts we're seeing what taking 44 billion dollars and setting it on fire looks like.
Turns out this guy who consistently beat all odds and pushes progress further than imagine, is just completely randomly involved in all these events, as CEO but that's just a detail. And obviously he's a fraud, there's someone else all this time really running the show, probably a lizard.
Elon is brash, tough to work with and doesn't behave in upstanding ways, and I don't think I'd want to work for him; he's a jerk. But all this doesn't make wishful denial become true.
> Turns out this guy who consistently beat all odds
Where is the Hyperloop? Since he announced it China has build 3 thousand miles of high speed rail.
How many cars travelled through boring company tonnels?
How many years ago was Full Self Driving meant to be released?
> doesn't behave in upstanding ways
He was sued for sexual harrasment, unfair dismissal, dangerous working conditions, defamation, reneging on signed contract, by SEC for lying to investors, and countless others.
If an average person broke this many laws, their life would be ruined.
Yes, isn't that all proof that he's clearly not just a mere average joe? Everyone fails, he fails less than most all of us, and he does really daring things.
We can dislike him all we want for all his flaws, he's going to be in history books. If he wasn't so ruthless about achieving his goals, the moonshots he did achieve would have been failures as well.
We can dislike someone and still recognize their impact, people aren't black or white. Nuanced opinions are possible.
He fails less because he got lucky at some time and made his money, and then after that he acts like a bully and tries to beat down any opposition. Selling company at 420, what was he penalized? Other allegations, what did he lose? If there was a genuine fear of him losing something substantial, I am pretty sure his attitude will change.
No one is questioning his impact, but the people do question and have the right to question the methods. But we live in a corrupt system, we can point fingers in many directions, and rightly so. He is just one of a breed.
Why do you think the hyperloop should be anywhere? It was just an idea Elon threw out there for someone else to build, not a project he tried to build. (Don't confuse Boring Co Loop in vegas with an attempt to build high speed partial vacuum tunnel at human scale)
Yeah, but buying twitter isn't smart. It shows a glaring lack of critical thinking and foresight. So like most rich people. He got lucky in the past and the past may not be a measure of the future.
The mental gymnastics people on HN perform to diminish Musk's real achievements deserves 10s across the board.
I mean if you hate the guy just say so (for extra credit, explain why). Don't lie about his achievements and intelligence. They are so obviously real. Yes, luck is involved too, but it's not the only thing by far. He fucken self-learned rocket science in 6 years.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Musk is a good project manager if you think that crash or crash through is a good project management methodology. And Telsa and SpaceX (Which is supported by defence industry) are very different in their offerings than twitter.....
So he lead first new major US car company in a century and started the first viable private rocket company in 50 years, but you’re concerned that he won’t be able to figure out how to make Twitter profitable?
People want cars, defence wants rockets. People use twitter, but in the list of things that are required in the future. A terse environment for people to shitpost each other may not be essential.
The skills to run SpaceX and Tesla transfer to running Twitter a lot more than basketball to cooking. For one thing, they all (leading SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter) have running a large business in common.
Does it need to be a good financial outcome for it to be smart?
I view the whole thing as Elon getting bored and wanting a new toy to play with. When you have as much wealth as he does, a loss hardly really matters. If he can make it profitable somehow, that's just a bonus.
Musk more or less got trapped into a deal with Twitter that was largely based upon numbers that were fabricated by executives.
From his perspective, the way to salvage this mess is layoffs. Some of the previous executives (Parag) have committed fraud imo, and should face consequences. They won't though.
Lot's of twitter employees will suffer. To varying degrees, many of them played a role in the house of cards that is twitter.
Musk did not get trapped into a deal. He thought he was being cute and it blew up in his face.
First he was on the board, then he wasn't. Then he thought it would be funny to agree to buy Twitter for a price that had "420" in it, then the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.
Either something changed recently in Musk, he has been hiding the fact that he has had a few screws loose for years, or both.
I guess most people just get depressed when they hit middle age. When you are wealthy, you can knock up one of your employees and buy a company on a whim.
> the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.
Small correction: he wrote an open "I declare" letter to Twitter 'canceling' the deal: Twitter got to Delaware court first (within days of his letter), and it took Musk's lawyers 2 weeks to file.
This is the only part of this I am speaking to because the rest is exactly what is happening. Musk messed up and now a whole lot of people are put in a terrible situation going right into the holiday season. It's unconscionable for one of the richest people in the world to behave this way.
Can you point out where in the report it is claimed that the number of spam accounts is outright fabricated? The closest I can find is that Mudge accuses Twitter leadership of not knowing and/or not being interested in the total number of spam bots, but that is a very different accusation than fabricating the number of spam bots.
In addition, the number of spam bots is more or less a red herring - the only representation regarding bots that Twitter made during the acquisition was the false/spam/etc. rate among its mDAU. There was no representation made as to the total number of bots on Twitter, nor the percentage of all Twitter accounts which are bots.
That Musk focused on a different number is more or less entirely on him, and is a significant reason his lawsuit never really went anywhere.
It's also important to note that data scientists Musk hired failed to find evidence that supported his "wildly higher" claim - one firm found an 11% "fake user number" at an 80% confidence interval, while the other found a 5.3% spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU at a 90% confidence interval. Hardly the kind of evidence one would want to have when accusing Twitter of lying, let alone fraud.
Page 8 there’s an entire section dedicated to discussing bot accounts.
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Yes, that's the section I read. None of it supports a claim that bot numbers were fabricated.
The first and biggest problem is that the paragraph is talking about the total number of spam bots on Twitter, while the number that Twitter represented to Musk was the percentage of false/spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU. These are two different metrics and cannot be directly compared. Even if the paragraph directly accused Twitter of falsifying and/or fabricating the total number of spam bots on Twitter, it would have no relevance towards the merger since Twitter made no representations of the total number of spam bots on Twitter to Musk.
The second problem is that nothing in that paragraph implies fabrication - it's basically complaining that Twitter isn't paying attention to a metric Mudge thinks should be measured. "We don't know the answer and aren't interested in finding out" is not the same thing as "We don't know the answer and made something up instead".
The third problem is that Musk's own analysis failed to hint at fabrication as well - even if Mudge directly accused Twitter of fabrication, his claim was contradicted by other evidence.
> None of it supports a claim that bot numbers were fabricated
'In fact, Mudge learned deliberate ignorance was the norm amongst the executive leadership team. In early 2021, as a new executive, Mudge asked the Head of Site Integrity (responsible for addressing platform manipulation including spam and botnets), what the underlying spam bot numbers were. Their response was “we don't really know."'
If they don't know what the spam numbers are, then where is the 5% figure coming from?
I already quoted this part but this is also relevant:
"The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform."
They aren't able to provide an upper bound on the total number of spam accounts.
None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
> If they don't know what the spam numbers are, then where is the 5% figure coming from?
Again, that is 5% of mDAU, not 5% of accounts. Mudge is complaining about the latter, Twitter only represented the former.
In any case, Twitter's methodology to get the 5% figure, based on what was stated in court, appears to be:
1. Every day, have someone(s) randomly sample 100 users from the mDAU pool and use various pieces of data to try to determine which of those sampled accounts are spam/false accounts
2. At the end of the quarter, use the 90 samples to estimate the proportion of spam/false accounts among all mDAU users
This allows one to get a relatively tight estimate of the proportion of spam/false accounts among mDAU users without knowing the precise number of spam accounts among mDAU or the upper bound on the total number of spam accounts among all users on the platform. The former isn't known because of the statistical nature of the method, and the latter isn't known because the pool the samples are drawn from isn't the one needed to determine the total number of bots.
> None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
Non-mDAU users consist of more than just spam accounts, though - for example, inactive users and users using non-monetizable clients are excluded. If the precise makeup of the pool of non-mDAU users is not known, then that would easily explain not knowing the upper bound on spam accounts.
Strictly speaking, one can trivially provide an upper bound on the number of spam accounts - just give the total number of accounts - but that's hardly a useful answer. Presumably Mudge wanted something with more precision, and if that information is not tracked than Twitter obviously wouldn't be able to give a useful answer, no deception needed.
> These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
But it doesn't state that Twitter fabricated the total number of spam accounts, does it?
And once again, the total number of spam bots is irrelevant to Musk's purchase. Twitter made no representations regarding such a statistic in its SEC filings or in the merger agreement, so there can be no fraud or falsification regarding that statistic. The only statistic Twitter provided regarding bots was the 5% number, and that was bots as a percentage of mDAU, which is different from the statistic Mudge was complaining about.
Actually, from what I recall of Mudge's claims, it basically validates Twitter's mDAU metric. Mudge's complaint boils down to he thinks the mDAU metric is the wrong thing to measure in large part because it focuses too much on measuring value for advertisers rather than the health of the platform.
Those paragraphs are discussing that there are a number of KNOWN fake accounts that are not included in mDAU.
The very next paragraphs state that they have no idea just how many total fake accounts there are. That is, there is a number of fake accounts that they don't know about (and don't make any effort to count), and they are concerned that counting them will affect stock price.
Said another way, they are admitting they aren't counting all the fake accounts. That's in paragraphs 17 & 18
The relevant financial representations have always been about the mDAU numbers. It's Musk who is trying to pretend that the "5% of mDAU may be spam account" really meant "5% of all accounts are spam accounts."
Mudge isn't saying that Twitter's statements about mDAU are wrong; he's saying that he thinks it's a bad metric, because mDAU ignores the effect of fake accounts. Even if Mudge is correct in his assessment that mDAU is a bad metric, it does not sustain any allegations of fraud.
> Mudge isn't saying that Twitter's statements about mDAU are wrong;
He literally did say that. I get the sense you're not reading the whistleblower docs... Or just arguing for the sake of arguing. I've quoted Mudge. Whereas you are inferring things based on what Musk said.
I've already linked the docs so I won't again. I've pointed out where this information can be found. Those documents are in no uncertain terms stating that Twitter does not have a grasp of how many fake accounts there are. Therefore, any number they give is wrong.
> On May 13, Mr. Musk expressed doubts about the accuracy of Twitter's claim in legal filings that <5% of accounts are “bots,” or automated spam accounts that spread propaganda and hurt the experience of real users:'
He's repeating Musk's claim here. Recall that Twitter says that 5% of mDAU are potentially spam. That's not the same as accounts.
P16:
> However there are many millions of active accounts that are not considered “mDAU,” either because they are spam bots, or because Twitter does not believe it «can monetize them.
So when Twitter is saying "mDAU generally excludes spam bots", he's indirectly saying that it's correct.
P26:
> A more meaningful and honest answer to Mr. Musk’s question would be trivial for Twitter to calculate, given that Twitter is already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mDAU. But this number is likely to be meaningfully higher than 5%:
Quite literally saying here that "<5% of mDAU is spam" is correct!
So, yes I have read the whistleblower docs. The disconnect here is that I believe you have not read Twitter's filings, which do not in fact claim that "<5% of accounts are spam" but "<5% of mDAU are spam" (see, e.g., https://sec.report/Document/0001418091-22-000075/).
This is an incorrect conclusion to draw. Twitter states that they estimate that a certain percentage of a subset of users is spam/false accounts. That they don't know the percentage of spam/false accounts outside of that subset of users has no bearing on the accuracy of their statement regarding their chosen subset.
As a greatly reduced example, I can say that neither the @elonmusk nor the @chancery_daily accounts are spam accounts. I have no idea how many accounts Twitter has, let alone how many of those are spam accounts, but that lack of knowledge does not affect the accuracy of my first statement.
Internal chats (some screenshots floating around) that show the publicly cited bot % was known to be flawed and they have no idea how many active users are on the platform.
Trapped into a deal? Are you serious? No one held a gun to Elon Musk’s head and told him to buy Twitter. He did that on his own accord.
He should have just left them alone. If the executives were so incompetent, he’d have gotten a better deal by waiting for them to fail. Or shorting the stock like a normal investor.
Facts such as: a) he voluntarily waived due dilligence b) he explicitly claimed he was buying twitter to fix the bot problem c) no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number.
> no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number
This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Did it? At least based on what was shown in court, that seems hard to believe, especially given data scientists he hired failed to produce mDAU spam numbers significantly off from what Twitter had, let alone off to the point where fabrication becomes a likely explanation.
> Any citation for that? I thought Elon waived most of the contingencies.
IIRC it's kind of true. Section 7(b)(i) of the merger agreement [0], which is part of the section describing the conditions under which the merger will take place, states:
> each of the representations and warranties of the Company contained in this Agreement (except for the representations and warranties contained in Section 4.2(a) and Section 4.2(b)), without giving effect to any materiality or “Company Material Adverse Effect” qualifications therein, shall be true and correct as of the Closing Date..., except for such failures to be true and correct as would not have a Company Material Adverse Effect
And Section 4.6 of the agreement describes Twitter's representations regarding its SEC documents and financial statements. Among other things, it states:
> As of their respective dates... none of the Company SEC Documents at the time it was filed... contained any untrue statement of a material fact or omitted to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, or are to be made, not misleading.
At least by my reading (and the general sense I got from more knowledgeable commentators), this basically means that Twitter represents that its SEC filings contain no material inaccuracies, and that the merger shall take place unless those filings contain inaccuracies significant enough to cause a Company Material Adverse Effect.
So in one sense, the deal depends on Twitter's numbers being not too inaccurate - if Musk could prove that Twitter's numbers were wrong and that that inaccuracy was enough to cause a MAE, then he would be able to back out of the deal.
What is incorrect, though, is the implication that the deal could not go forward until Musk checked Twitter's numbers. The deal basically assumes Twitter's numbers are correct, with the default action being that the merger will happen. The onus was on Musk to prove Twitter's numbers incorrect to the point that it will cause a MAE; otherwise, he must go through with the deal. Proving a MAE is an incredibly high bar - from what I've seen from other commentators, a MAE has been found once in the entirety of Delaware's corporate legal history, and given how Musk's evidence was turning out during trial it seemed extremely unlikely he would have been able to successfully argue that claim.
If that's even remotely true, he could have continued the court case. Presumably he would have won. Facts matter in a court case, and I think Elon's legal team told him that the facts weren't on his side.
Because it’s exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate bot account metrics without data that is exclusive to the company.
Factor in that Twitter did not have processes in place to accurately count the spam accounts themselves. The truth is that there is not currently an accurate count of Twitter’s fake users.
The only thing that deal was contingent on was his financing, and the contingency that would trigger if he failed to come up with it was him owing Twitter a billion dollars.
I read through it, can you please quote the part where Mudge says Twitter lied about their mDAU count, or lied about their count of bots on the platform?
Mudge says Parag is lying about not being incentivized to remove spam, and then tries to do a sleight of hand thing by saying Musk is right because Musk is confused by what he sees in his own replies on the site vs what Twitter is actually reporting in their SEC filings. Those are two separate numbers, and Twitter only reported one.
Elon's takeover began 6 months ago, and he's never hidden his disdain for how the company is run. All those PEOPLE with lives and families would have been smart to take the hint and start interviewing instead of waiting to see if Elon would spare them.
I don't know why comments are so against these layoffs. Twitter is known for having a "chill" work environment and I have heard many stories of people just slacking off and doing other things while getting paid. I would actually like to see Twitter's team and culture rebuilt regardless of who bought it.
> Too many people, too fast. There's no way these are going to be sensible, surgical layoffs.
If I were working there, I'd want the layoffs to be as swift and brief as possible. Having the sword of Damocles hanging over my head day to day would be unbearable. I'd rather Twitter have one big layoff and then re-focus on the product if it were me.
> The service is definitely going to suffer.
I see this claim, but don't quite get it. What are engineers doing there? Are they like Homer Simpson pushing a red button every day to keep the site running? It seems like kind of a set-and-forget type of operation at this point, since so few new features are developed. They copied a couple of other social media startups (Clubhouse & Substack) in the past couple of years, and they changed the stylesheet, but otherwise, doesn't seem like much has happened. Have they done a ton of optimization work that we simply don't know about? (And if not, why do they need it?) I just don't get the claim.
FWIW, I'm expecting to see essentially no difference in Twitter for at least six months.
Fair point. Agreed on the surgical layoffs. I assumed that Twitter's culture was rotting very deeply already since they haven't made much progress for a long time.
There’s an underlying fact that the committee of people didn’t care about Twitter as a company right? That if you believe in your company and the welfare of your workers, and you believe Elon is a threat to them and your vision of whatever modern communication Twitter serves, then you wouldn’t sell it to him.
But they did right? As in the group lacks conviction.
There was not a single stipulation in that sale that said “please keep our people on for X amount of time”.
The board represents the shareholders, of course they were going to take an over market offer. If they hadn't they'd be mired in shareholder lawsuits til the end of time.
The management and the shareholders are not the same thing. The board represents the shareholders, not the management. If they don't take the offer they get sued for breaching fiduciary responsibility.
Is it? In general at every place I've worked the vast majority of the work has come from launching & supporting new products. Existing infra does not really break that often, so if we just want Twitter as it is, that should be doable by 1/10th of the people. I'm not picking just on Twitter -- I feel this is the case broadly. Maintenance of a system that doesn't change is fairly straightforward as compared to innovation.
If your experience with services not under active development is that they are "breaking all the time," I'm sorry to say that you've worked only at places where the quality bar is very low.
Services that aren't under active development break as the things above them change and they are put into environments they weren't in before. This is very normal and the reason you don't see problems happening because of this is either because you're moving slowly (which is a valid way to do things…but not typical) or your have an army of people keeping it all running smoothly.
Alternative take: I was at Google when they killed Reader. At the time they pulled the plug, Reader had already been destaffed for years and was kept going in one guy's 20% time. The infrastructure effectively ran itself - the underlying Google datacenter teams replaced machines when they died, everything else was automated.
My experience there was pretty consistent with that: if you leave things alone, they won't break. Virtually all breakage was caused by changing things. On a well automated system repairing the physical components, rolling OS updates from time to time and so on, is not a huge amount of work.
The idea that Twitter is ever "not under active development" is ludicrous.
Services with hundreds of millions of users, antagonistic spammers/hackers/countries, and advertisers spending millions are never in maintenance mode.
You sound like you're trying to apply your understanding of lifestyle software businesses to one of the largest real-time communication networks in human history.
I don't believe I claimed Twitter was not under active development. The point that I was making here is that if we were OK with Twitter as-is, it would be possible to maintain it with far fewer people than they employ now. Indeed, 'maintenance' will be defined differently for an indie hacker vs. a popular website with user-generated content. But all software has some split of "keeping the lights on" vs. innovating.
What is your estimate of Twitter's effort split between those two categories?
Exactly. Any one who has ever worked in SaaS industry realizes how many cogs in a wheel it takes to keep it running. Sure, there are always inefficiencies and redundancies. But, I highly doubt Elon figured out in a week that 50% of employees are not necessary. This looks like the vindictive and impulsive action of a man baby who has never been told that he doesn't always know what's best. Time will surely tell. All the best to those who were laid off, but most importantly, good luck to those who are staying back. They are in for a ride.
No one is contesting the merits of infra at scale. There are essential teams that would likely be untouched because their job is operationally critical. However, other teams for less vital jobs would be cut. I think you are making an assumption that the core team who manages the infra is being laid off which is not clear.
He just made Twitter take on $13bn of debt to finance his purchase, the company will owe around $1bn a year in interest payments that it didn't used to. The layoffs announced today probably won't even cover that extra interest.
It's also just cruel. Twitter employees must be feeling immense whiplash. First they were being bought out, then they weren't, then they were again, then a huge change in work culture literally overnight, now mass layoffs.
Elon Musk, it seems, does not think about the humans affected by his decisions. Regardless of anyone's opinions on whether the culture was good or bad, this sort of sudden mass loss of employment will cause pain. Pain that didn't need to happen.
Yes, of course. Stress and Fear are the cornerstones of responsible leadership. You can say that this is intentional, but it just means he is an asshole.
No but we do know this plan was thrown together extremely quickly. We know a few days ago developers were told to print off (!) their code for review. Let’s state the obvious: it takes more than a week to plan an effective layoff of half your staff.
The "too many" people is in comparison with other companies and the revenue these companies bring in. Twitter is at the highest end of the list of more employees per money.
It might not be the wisest thing, but in comparison with others tech companies and only in this component it's accurate.
The verge article mentioned elsewhere in this discussion claims "His team of outside advisors has spent the last week determining which engineers to keep based on their contributions to Twitter’s codebase, according to employees involved in the discussion". Of course how well of a job they can do in a week is anyone's guess, but it sounds like there was a lot more internal and external knowledge involved than just Elon's gut feeling on who's important.
Many big tech companies, especially in the social space, are extremely bloated. They could literally have 10x more employees and everyone would still find something meaningless to work on. On the other hand they could have had far fewer employees and the company would have delivered better results and built a better product. A lean, focused engineering culture will do wonders to a company like Twitter.
I do agree overall, but it is very hard to achieve such a lean organization. Broad layoffs such as this tend to demotivate employees and cause your best employees to look for work where they don't have to worry as much about job security. I am fairly certain anybody with talent and drive would not be looking forward to continue working at Twitter in the coming days, at least without a significant pay raise (which Musk would want to avoid).
How confident are you in Elon's ability to identify "chaff" within a week? What makes you think the remaining 50% will continue to work at full capacity after this?
One way is to look at a few most recent perf reviews. Another way - look at some internal productivity metric that many companies introduced during Covid/WFH.
Yes. Underperformance is a decent indicator. Number of PRs is not a great one, but it can be somewhat correlated with eng velocity/productivity. Twitter will probably end up using a combination of metrics like that.
They will hopefully also talk to EMs, but at this scale might choose not to. It's going to be an ugly process but I doubt it's going to be a random one. They clearly understand that it's in their interest to retain the most skilled and performant employees.
Also, don't want to sound too cynical, but I would guess that it's actually not that hard to evaluate eng performance with all the data companies are collecting during WFH. I am sure Twitter requires using a VPN, so digging into that data would yield quite a revealing and precise performance metric. The only reason this approach is not widespread is ethical, not technological.
I’m having a hard time believing that a large number of people are doing nothing but slacking off at these companies. When people say their tech company has a “chill” culture normally they mean they don’t have to work overtime or during the weekends. Or they don’t get super stressed about hard deadlines. Not that they work 30 minutes a day. I worked for 2 big tech companies that have the “chill” culture label and never met somebody that was literally doing nothing or didn’t have a project assigned. I’m sure there are exceptions but that’s it. It’s not like in the TV show where they go and hang in the roof all day.
A very large number of people do slack off at these companies. Some engineers code only a few hours a week. They do attend meetings and such, but the actual task delivery timeline is very relaxed.
But how do you know that’s actually true? They might be just posting that to sound cool in some social app. In these companies everyone has a manager and assigned to a project. I don’t think it’s like in the tv shows or in consulting companies where you can spend months waiting for a project and actually doing nothing.
I've worked in Fortune 50 and in the Gov. Both are equally unproductive. Swaths of people doing nothing all day. Stagnancy is remarkable.
Also, makes it incredibly easy to climb the ranks and get rewarded for it. Whenever there is malaise in workplace, I work twice as hard. Build tools for others, solve their problems, uplift folks and motivate them. What good is it to sit around sadly wasting away your life with a resentful attitude. It's not fun and these people make things worse for others that are around them. By far the worst is working in the Gov. Not only people slack off, but they don't even try to hide it. Openly and shamelessly. It's not my type of an environment at all.
I wanna build shit with cool people and live a fulfilling life.
I see what you're saying, but I think this is a take that doesn't stand up to much analysis. The correct amount of employees is the goal, we wouldn't cheer their workforce growing by 10x as a universal good, it's not sustainable and likely to imperil the jobs of everyone. But it's the "good" that's the inverse of this "bad".
> I see what you're saying, but I think this is a take that doesn't stand up to much analysis.
I don't think it needs to, nor was I trying to make any kind of argument of the sort. The (former) employees are going to suffer and pay the price for the past mistakes of the corporate leaders. It's a depressing situation even if it is the absolute correct action for Twitter to take.
For that reason, I don't think it is hard to understand why there are so many comments against the layoffs.
Firing people based off of "lines of code submitted" immediately after crunching them for 80+ hour weeks is a really shitty way of trying to accomplish that goal.
I didn't really understand yakaccount4's take on this. If they are concerned about optics, what can one do to not layoff? would they just let the company continue to perform mediocrely and continue to bloat its burn just for the sake of not laying off people?
this makes the common mistake that there will always continue to be a company with resources for the workers, regardless of how it performs. The company as a concept exists as a going concern, _then_ it can support workers. If the company ceased to exist, the workers could continue to report to work and produce output, but they would be unhappy with the compensation.
At the same time, "too many people would lose their jobs [in insurance]" was *one of the reasons why we didn't get the public option when Obamacare passed.
There are definitely cases where people losing their jobs is a necessary evil to get us to a place of greater good. We should certainly support those that get laid off, but it shouldn't stop us (collectively) from improving how our society functions.
I'm reminded of the Soviet Union joke about full employment. Of course we have full employment - like at the subway entrance: one person takes your ticket, another brings it to the machine, the third one makes the stamp and the fourth hands it back to you. See? Everyone has a job!
Losing jobs will eventually happen regardless for any business that loses money like they were. When the company has over-hired, layoffs at least mean they're taking corrective action now.
Sucks for the people affected now, possibly impacts fewer people long-term though. I doubt many Twitter employees will struggle to find reemployment quickly.
You're mistaken. I am not wishing for it and my comment doesn't "wish for it". I am just not against the decision that I clearly have no say in. I'm just looking forward into a decision that was already made.
I am speculating as a non Twitter user looking at it from the outside that the Twitter staff and primary Twitter user base shared the same views and culture.
So Musk is probably going to alienate a majority of his users doing this and Twitter will probably go into disrepute and decline now.
I have seen this happen to forums and boards I posted on where some moderators get de-modded which angers a lot of the users who leave or start posting less. Then the culture goes into decline and never returns. Maybe something like that is about to happen, or maybe not.
Because you're not going to know who the 'slackers' are in the first week or so of owning a company and actions like these are a great way to ensure that your company doesn't get rebuilt.
Despite how many Musk reply guys seem to exist, most of them aren't engineers and even fewer of them are dumb enough to work for a Musk-owned Twitter where you get to be overworked and underpaid.
Why not? If the rumors are true, there are people who don’t commit code (or design docs etc) for months on end. Wouldn’t it be pretty easy to identify those people?
I work with a pretty good QA tester guy who doesn't write any of code, but can configure an entire realistic test network across Windows / Linux servers, Android devices, IOS devices in a day.
Are ya going to fire him after seeing his lack of GIT commits after one week as CEO?
Well the current events says Engineers were asked to print code which applies to only relevant parties (ex, people who are expected to commit code). If you are QA testing and aren't expected to commit code then it should be obvious that you are not subjected to that rubric.
Because you and I both know those rumors aren't true. Upper management at any big company isn't going to let any of that slide no matter the culture. And implying that 50% of people are that level of unproductive is laughable by any metric. You could probably make some shit up by pointing at a technical manager that hasn't written code in a while but that's not indicative of their actual performance.
All of Musk's companies have a reputation for being really sucky places to work. Interesting, but poorly paid, authoritarian and very long hours. It's suffering you accept to learn stuff and then leave, I've heard it described. Not a place to have kids.
Meaning Musk cannot rehire anyone who's left these companies.
No true scotsman fallacy aside, firms make this mistake all the time and have to rehire the star/legacy maintainer at contractor rates to keep things running.
> I would actually like to see Twitter's team and culture rebuilt regardless of who bought it.
There you go. I don't think having giant operational costs at a company and having a head count in the thousands and sitting there losing more money without maximizing revenue it sustainable for any business.
Perhaps Twitter itself was overdue a massive correction, hence the first step is drastic layoffs and cuts.
I had lunch there a couple of times. The food was fantastic!
I'm curious how much damage all this negativity will have on Twitter culture going forward and what it will take to rebuild it. Is it just throwing money at the layoff "survivors" or is it really the mission of building the Internet's town square? I'm pretty interested to see how this plays out!
I've always heard these types of stories, and someone showed me a clip from a show once with some nerds on the roof. I can't help but wonder if that's real life for some people. I get nervous sometimes if I'm taking too long taking walks during my break, not that I'm going to get caught or scolded for going a few minutes over, but that mentally I'm harming my integrity by not honoring the commitment I made.
I can imagine the type of person that embodies this type of developer is someone who clicks 'I agree' without reading the terms of service, or shows up late to personal engagements.
Is it that simple? I doubt it. The man owns Starlink. Imagine that for a second. Imagine owning a social network that is a first class citizen to a global satellite network that no government can ever censor.
He could be pivoting the company into something astonishing.
The months leading up to Verizon's fateful decision in December 2018, they were in the range of over 500 million MAU. Within a couple months after, the number was half that.
Wasn't the downfall of Betamax that the tapes were limited to 1 hour (which Sony thought was fine since that was the unit of commercial videotapes) and most people wanted to record sporting events that took longer than an hour?
A censorship-resistant communication system and a Starlink sized dish are a good recipe for people going to jail in countries where Twitter is actually censored.
Governments that engage in active censorship also frequently are not the warm-and-fuzzy entities that westerners are used to when they think of governments.
That’s the whole point, no one is supposed to control it. Ugh, I sound silly, but here’s the Batman quote:
Not the hero we want, but the hero we deserve.
Yes, reverse the bans and connect this shit to Starlink and tell governments “I got no clue where those damn satellites are, can’t help ya, Trump’s tweeting from somewhere in Somalia with a VPN”.
Wait hold on a minute isn't there already some kind of amendment that makes this irrelevant?
Although since the Saudis own such a massive chunk of this newly private company I guess the US government is no longer the only one that Elon needs to concern himself with.
Sounds great, but who pays for it? The purchase of Twitter was done via loans and now, interest rates are not zero. Musk will have to service considerable debt to keep Twitter alive.
If he can pull this off, he'll go down in history as one of the must successful business person of his generation. If he fails, he will still has Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla to brag about.
> he purchase of Twitter was done via loans and now, interest rates are not zero. Musk will have to service considerable debt to keep Twitter alive.
Those loan rates were negotiated before the recent hikes. They had some range built in based on what the market did, but he is definitely paying below current market rates.
That maybe takes care of debt servicing, but what about growth? Business exist to grow shareholder value (public or private). Elon needs to solve that puzzle.
If 50m people pay the 8 dollar a month fee that’s another decent chunk of change.
Will be interesting to see how all these rapid fire changes play out over the next few years.
I’m not sure the path to growth for Twitter depends on a lot of net new development. More so better monetization of the existing platform, which can largely be done via small tweaks here and there
It will cast a narrative of Musk as someone who is successful only in a low interest rate economy. When interest rates tighten, companies have to show they can deliver more than Treasury notes. That was really easy when the interest rates were close to zero.
Bigco software engineering has been quite chill / slack-off for some time. Rude awakening for a lot of devs if they have been resting on their laurels.
Honest question: Why would anyone willingly stay at Twitter? He seems extremely employee unfriendly, and it’s not like working at Twitter is some noble cause. Why wouldn’t you immediately go work somewhere else, assuming you’re reasonably employable?
All Tesla employees (some who had worked there for 10+ years) who were laid off this year got 1 week severance. You think he's gonna let Twitter employees get anything of value out the door?
And Tesla is being sued for WARN Act violations, which mandates 60 days severance, but it remains to be seen if they can enforce it
> An employer who violates the WARN Act notice requirement is liable to each affected employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of violation up to 60 days. An employer who fails to provide notice as required to a unit of local government is subject to a civil penalty not to exceed $500 for each day of violation. The penalty may be avoided if the employer satisfies the liability to each affected employee within three weeks after the closing. In any suit, the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party a reasonable attorney’s fee as part of the costs. These are the only remedies that WARN provides.
That fine might not be large enough to discourage bad actors
Could also be opportunity. Tumultuous times are sometimes the best environment to advance quickly. Not my cup of tea, but some ambitious folks thrive in that.
Why were there still thousands of engineers working at Yahoo! years after they'd done anything even slightly interesting, at the moment they got bought by a fading regional telephone company?
I didn't last until Verizon, but Yahoo!, for better or worse, was a lot of different products with a shared user database, adsystem, package repo, and mediocre corporate management.
If you were happy with your product, and corporate management wasn't involved, eh, it's fine. I might have stayed at YTravel longer if corporate meddling didn't get to me; although going to an actual small team rather than a small team in a big corp was a much better fit for me and it turned out really well.
How could you judge what it can become before it has became? Seems premature to leave if I was an employee not getting laid off. It really depends though, if I was an employee there then I would know who was lacking and who was performing, so it would be easier to judge the merit of the layoff.
It's a strategy. SpaceX has a reputation for mediocre pay, but if you point that out you get a whole bunch of people telling you that it's okay because it's such a privilege to work there. He wants his employees to come from his fanbase, because they're cheaper.
The privilege is shooting rockets into space, not working for Musk. I hardly doubt anyone thinks it would worth it to get treated like shit _and_ work on Twitter, but I guess we'll see!
I dunno, if he just happens to exploit people to do worthy things then that’s still better than most billionaires right?
We don’t get annoyed at the truly bad ones exploiting people, that’s just the way things are (e.g. Bezos), but because there is a disconnect between what we perceive as lofty goals (e.g. exploring space, electric cars) and exploiting employees, Musk gets a ton of (personal) flak.
He’s already mandating “84 hour workweeks”, as well as revoking WFH options. Those 2 items alone, even only 1 of the 2, are enough reason to leave a company and never look back. There is literally nothing that could balance the situation in favor of working there.
I am a software engineer and I am a little worried seeing all these layoffs. No company will have 100% layoff, so it could be possible to weather this downturn? What could be the best strategy to get through this difficult period?
Find ways to be better at your job. Speak up more. Take some initiative, solve a problem that needs solved. Be friendly. These are things we should always be doing, so the best time to do them was a year ago. The next best time is now.
I don't know the American market, but they are screaming for qualified developers in Europe and Asia where I work. I have been around long enough to know that if you are a good developer there will always be work for you. Especially if you are not super specialized and open to working with people.
There are plenty of highly paid dev jobs in the US too, it’s just that the market isn’t river-of-lava-on-the-sun hot like it has been the last 10+ years.
We went through a similar period in 2008. It's best to live below your means and increase your savings. It may take longer to find a new role when thousands of candidates are also looking and large companies have frozen hiring.
Labor supply will increase considerably, while labor demand declines.
Comp packages will decline across the board, or at the very least stagnate for years.
If you work for a fairly valued, profitable company, you’re likely to keep your job. If you work for a highly unprofitable and overvalued moonshot company, you likely won’t
This is not true. The way layoffs almost always work is the CEO tells their VPs they need to cut, say, 10% of their staff. The VPs tell their Directors they need to cut 10% of their staff. And so on, and so forth.
And everyone managing people at every step of the way has an unofficial stack ranking in the back of their mind, and they just cut the names at the bottom of that ranking. The person turning in half assed work while being obviously overemployed will be the first to go.
Yeah right. This assumes no politics. Reality, and yes, I've been a consultant for too long is that first the consultants, temps, ... go. These are the best and the worst workers.
Then whoever is up for a promotion gets fired. Because, well I'm not sure. Somewhere between threatening the boss' job and jealousy. This causes a number of not-layed-off people to also leave (just read the comments in this thread to see a few people that will do that). Whatever hope your company ever had of good morale is gone and will never return. Everyone hates each other from this point forward, and hierarchy is determined purely on ability to fire and pay.
Then the consultants get rehired for 20% higher pay, the worst workers first. Then the temps for 10% less, because work isn't getting done, and management finds out once again they never knew what the company is actually doing, that everyone used layoffs for their personal gain, and it's created an accelerating disaster. None of this fixes the problems, whether it's customer service or team morale, that the layoffs created, at best they slow the downward slide.
And I guarantee that it'll turn out to be a lot more expensive than never doing the layoff in the first place.
On my first layoff my friend told me you're the lucky one. I didn't understand until I survived a layoff at another company. Total downward spiral in the aftermath. I envy those who escaped sooner.
Anyone that can within reason should quit if they survive the first round of layoffs.
move to a company which actually makes money, preferably doing something anti-cyclical. For example, whatever company conned Musk into thinking that they can assess the value of engineers immediately based on git contributions is probably going to have a great business, first going into companies and selling them the software that lets them do that. Then later when it turns out they fired the wrong people they can sell consultants to replace them. Then later when it turns out the consultants can't take over the systems well enough without the fired engineers they will be able to sell reduction services yet again.
It will take four years and several big bankruptcies before people catch on that they are being conned. By that time there will be other companies coming up that you can jump ship to.
What's interesting is this is almost the opposite of April, 2020. Rather than low-wage service sector workers getting laid off, it's high-wage tech workers.
Preface: Not questioning anyone's ability, and don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I understand there's red tap, politics, etc.
Twitter's UI design and usability is lacking greatly.
Till this day, I'm confused. This button, it's to see who replied, and this button it's to view actual comments. Clicking an image on a tweet shows a different view with replies in comparison to clicking the body of the tweet. And once I finally get to see comments, it shows me 5 or so comments, with a "show more" that shows 3 more.
Content is just one long stream of white without any grouping/sections. And both sidebars are white. Truly a pain. I've noticed these problems like 5+ years ago. And these problems are not subjective, but objectively wrong. I believe some of these layoffs are correct.
Agreed. A regular frustration for me is clicking on a tweet that is a replay to a tween, and then I still have to scroll back to see the original tweet. I'm old and mostly use desktop, so I don't really know that's how it works on mobile.
That's because it was optimised to show you ads, and not for your comfort. Otherwise it wouldn't be a ridiculously bloated SPA, and instead be more like Nitter or some of the other alternate UIs that have appeared. Given the focus on $$$, I doubt Musk will change that aspect of Twitter in a direction that's better for you.
Definitely, platforms optimize for ads. But these things are actually not concerning ad display/engagement. On the contrary, these UX improvements would increase my engagement, and thus ad engagement.
This feels very reminiscent of when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in an official CEO capacity. He laid off 3000 people in his first year as CEO and was ruthless with axing unnecessary projects and product lines. He also installed key NeXT employees into positions of influence. The rest is of course history. I'm curious to see how this plays out for Musk and Twitter.
Very true. Furthermore I'm curious to see where Twitter will innovate moving forward. After S. Jobs "slashed and burned", he set his teams first on the iMac and then iPod in Aug. 1998 and Oct. 2001 respectively. I keep reading articles about how Musk wants to turn Twitter into an "app for everything" similar to WeChat in China. I'm a bit skeptical.
When you do a renovation, you don’t try and work around the existing structures. You demolish them and rip it down to the studs - to the “good bones” that hold it all up. Then and only then can you install your newly designed structure inside the old structure. This is how a rebuild is done.
There is absolutely no way they managed to do proper due diligence to understand who on the team is essential ("good bones" for the structure) vs. those that are not. It's been a week.
The difference is Steve Jobs at least knew a thing or two about running a tech company whereas Musk had social media engineers print out code to show his car company engineers.
Not the person you're replying to, but it's not "more complicated" per se, technically, but Twitter is as Musk puts it a town square, and if you're going to treat a product that relies on a social network like a car or a rocket...can't see the analogous processes applying here
> Thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.
>The second source described the proposed cuts as "delusional," adding that when user traffic kicks up, the service can fail "in spectacular ways."
>Teams across Twitter are racing to present a plan to achieve the cost savings by a Nov. 7 deadline, according to one of the sources and the Slack message. Some employees have been ordered to work in the office every day of the week to meet the deadline, the source said.
Bringing his renowned brand of work-life balance to Twitter I see.
If a well estabilished restaurant loses half its waiters right before the biggest dining week in the year, is it reasonable to expect that it fails in spectacular ways?
I think it is fair to say that left to its own devices (that is, pretend the last year of disruption and then this hadn't happened), Twitter could have become profitable enough to muddle on.
Everyone knew they had too many employees, and that big money-making possibilities... don't seem to be there, due to the nature of the niche they've carved. But they had a lot of money in the bank, so they didn't need to make any sudden movements. Sensible downsizing and incremental improvement of the bottom line, and, yeah, that's a viable business.
It may not be super exciting, but if you want exciting, head south on 101, Meta is about 40 minutes out depending on time of day.
Grade CCC bonds are well above 16% these days, and the amount of debt is $13 Billion. This very well could be $2 Billion/year interest payments.
I remember reading rumors of ~10% since the debt was signed in April 2020 and rumored to be 50% fixed and 50% adjustable. But I never actually found the real information or confirmation.
I think it's safe to say that the interest payment is somewhere between $1 and $2 billion, but there is also principal that needs to be paid back, right?
-----
That's not counting whatever debt Elon did to get his $33 Billion portion of the bill. I'm just looking at Twitters debt they now owe Morgan Stanley (and a few other banks) as part of the $13 Billion leveraged buyout portion of this company purchase.
> Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year.
Amazon went 14 years before posting a profit. Not that I think Twitter was necessarily investing revenue correctly, but a business can go pretty far even in the red.
Because Amazon was spending on R and D. AWS came as a result of that. Amazon's core business was known to overspend(still do) just for customer's satisfaction, and it was very clear Amazon could turn into profit any day they want. Same is not the case for Twitter.
Difference is Amazon spent a lot of it on durable infrastructure (datacenters, servers, fulfillment centers).
I don't know how Twitter spent its money, but seemingly on undifferentiated software (i.e. not durable) or moderation? Both of which are recurring expenses.
The difference is that Amazon made plenty of cash, and chose to reinvest all of it. For nearly all of those 14 years they could have just decided to be profitable, if it had been advantageous to do so.
I don't think Twitter is in the same position at all
Musk made a bad call for sure. There's no obvious path to recouping that investment.
But calling twitter a "perfectly viable company" is part of the problem. It's comments like this that inflate the bubble. Twitter has thousands of employees who have done close to nothing for at least several years.
Facebook/meta are at least trying new things. Twitter seems to be afraid to make any decisions at all.
Make take on Twitter for the last 5+ years is that it grew into its potential, it has value as-is, but there isn't a growth or monetization story beyond what it already has.
The private equity downsize strategy is probably right--you have to get it into a leaner state to start printing money--but the execution is poor, and Musk can too easily fiddle with the wrong knob and drive away uses a la Tumblr.
> Musk made a bad call for sure. There's no obvious path to recouping that investment.
You people really miss the bigger picture from the business side of things - Musk now owns the most impactful social network on the planet. Having an additional $44 billion in wealth does not bring you anything that is actionable. Its just inert wealth. Only when its used, wealth actually becomes something meaningful.
And Musk bought the biggest social network on the planet with that money. At this moment, he can do anything from boosting his own projects and businesses through Twitter to creating entirely new paradigm like making Twitter into a Western Wechat.
(Im obviously not counting Facebook as a top social network at this point)
> Facebook/meta are at least trying new things
Meta is banking on something that may or may not materialize. Its a gamble. Musk is going to copy what's already successful elsewhere.
> Most impactful as measured by what? Twitter isn’t even in the top 10 for dau/mau
It generates a lot of the agenda in certain socioeconomic segments. It disseminates a lot of information to these segments. Those segments dont overlap with Reddit. And if Musk keeps the 'free speech' thing going, it can also attract the segment that Reddit addresses.
> Twitter said in the email that its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data."
I have seen investment banks disable all logins for a whole division or trading floor, invite the people they aren’t firing to an all hands / town hall meeting to tell them as much, then announce to everyone else on the floor that they no longer have a job and will be escorted out of the building with any belongings they choose to collect within 30 minutes.
I’m not sure how normal it is, but it doesn’t objectively seem like there’s anything wrong with it.
Ooooh that is dark. Must have been fun for the smokers who have been around for a while. Having worked at a company that went through a few years of trouble, there were all sorts of little signals like that you'd learn to pick up on.
There's a scene in the movie "Margin Call" (about the 2007-2008 financial crisis) in which most of a floor of employees in an investment bank is laid off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2Xf9hAFcE
A company I was familiar with in the 80's had a subsidiary in another state with a couple hundred employees. They decided to close that office, and lay everyone off.
Being nice guys, they gave the branch 3 months notice of the closure and layoffs, and expected them to keep working as usual.
After 3 months, the parent company officials arrived to find the office building empty and looted clean.
> His team of outside advisors has spent the last week determining which engineers to keep based on their contributions to Twitter’s codebase, according to employees involved in the discussion [from the verge article]
That's a striking difference to the stripe layoffs discussed earlier today, and the experiences many others shared there.
I'd honestly not be surprised if they are primarily looking to lay off folks that are ideologically or politically opposed to Musk's values. Perhaps even getting rid of entire teams that in Musk's view aren't contributing to his vision? In fact I think trimming the bloat by performance metrics is at most a secondary objective.
I wouldn't be surprised if Musk wanted to do that, but I'm not sure it would be that easy to identify people who are opposed to Musk's values in a few days any more than it would be to decide based on performance metrics.
Twitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to.
It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.
If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
> It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
Yeah, and it's not just employees. Everyone seems to think Twitter is bigger and more important than it actually is. It's got significantly fewer DAU than say snapchat.
It's also:
- primarily public one-to-many so the social graph is less important than other mutually social platforms.
- mostly ephemeral, so the value of historical posts is.. Low. Much lower than say YouTube.
- no local communities with independent moderation (like reddit)
- primarily immutable text and links, which is cheap and easy to host
Out of all big platforms today, Twitter is by far the easiest to replace gradually, imo, with the least amount of upfront resources and least impacted by network effects.
Vulture capitalism refers to a very specific practice. It's also known as LBO (leveraged buy out) or asset stripping. In particular, vulture capitalists prey on distressed firms in need of cash, engage in a takeover, and proceed to gut the company.
This is not the same as referring to all capitalists as vultures. Vulture capitalists are a very specific subset of people engaged in a very specific, usually highly dishonest, business. Whether or not capitalists are vultures in general is just like, your opinion, man.
Dumb question - but for those that remain, now that they no longer have RSUs / ESPP / etc, would you expect their salaries to be made commensurate to what their comp was before? How is this usually handled for companies that go from public (and where a large part of comp is stock) to private?
Varies by company. My company recently went from public to private and they mostly told everyone getting RSUs to pound sand. No adjustment to salary to compensate for the change.
I'd be out the door already except the day they announced that, my director called me and gave me an RSU equivalent that was even bigger. Apparently they don't want to lose me yet. We'll certainly lose some developers though, and I don't blame them. Eventually I'll be one of them.
There are RSUs. When a company goes private, the RSUs convert to cash on the same vesting schedule. Of course the company can cancel them, but they usually keep the vesting schedule to keep the employees.
For the Twitter employees (if they keep their jobs and the RSUs are not canceled) this is a very good deal, because the stock price was really high due to the deal.
That is not universally true. Sometimes it works like that, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the buyer and given that this particular buyer doesn't seem interested in respecting legal contracts, I wouldn't be confident that it will work with Twitter as you describe here.
I get when and why companies lay people off. Sucks, but it makes sense.
What Musk is doing with Twitter employees isn't a layoff; it's tossing employees into the trash.
Let's compare how Stripe and Lyft have handled their RIFs this week:
STRIPE:
- 14 weeks severance pay
- Approximately 14 weeks of health insurance
- Waived RSU cliff and accelerated vests
LYFT
- 10 weeks of severance
- Something like 20 weeks of healthcare coverage
- Accelerated vest
- Notified via work email
- Not immediately locked out of their systems
TWITTER (under Elon)
- Asked to work well beyond 40 hr/wk
- No severance
- No vest
- Notified via personal email
- Crapshoot whether they can access systems later today
This is reprehensible.
I know I'm a small fish, but this was a chief reason behind me not buying another Tesla next year (which I was going to finance next month). I cannot support leaders who treat their people like this.
"If you do not receive an email from twitter-hr@ by 5PM PST on Friday Nov. 4th, please email peoplequestions@twitter.com"
Reminds me of that AOL employee that kept their badge for 6 months after they were laid off and kept eating at the cafeteria (or something along those lines)
Reminds me of he typical corporate take-over locusts.
1. Take over.
2. Layoffs.
3. Profits go up short term.
4. Then you notice all of the folks missing. Productivity drops.
5. Revenue drops, followed by dropping profits.
6. Folks move on to the next take over.
Difference, crucially, here is that Musk actually owns the shop, so we'll see if it is different with Twitter.
Except if Musk succeeds in ultimately destroying Twitter he's holding a $44 billion bag. Kind of overshadows making a couple of years of modest profits.
You'd think he'd be more circumspect about how he handles this $44 billion asset which he does not yet fully understand during his first week on the job, but I guess that's not his style.
The entire conversation just assumes that Twitter had too many people and needs to be slimmed down. Is that not the propaganda the new owner has pushed? Why take it as fact? Seems like he’s just doing the usual private equity things that we all despise.
Half of Twitter employees number 3,700 and if on average they make $100K then that's $370 million off Twitter's expenses. Does anyone know if that would make them profitable if current revenue doesn't decline?
Twitter lost ~200 million last year on ~5 billion revenue. With this purchase, the company is burdened with an additional 1.2 billion in interest expense on Elon's loans. Elon would have to fire something like 400% of their workforce (with no resulting loss in revenue) to dig himself out of the hole just from the added interest payments he's on the hook for.
Maybe Elon is still responsible for the loan but maybe Twitter is the collateral. If he fails to repay the loan, the bank seizes Twitter assets but Musk's personal wealth is untouched. Similar to how LLC's shield their owner from being financially responsible.
A general rule in the US, not in tech. If you look at most tech salary data points[1], equity and bonuses will often be an additional 50%-70%. Your estimate[2] likely only factors in the cost of benefits and employment taxes.
Assuming revenue stays the same, that would bring them close to profitability as long as you don't consider the loans Elon took out on the company's balance sheet.
If you do, they would still be massively unprofitable.
The average has got to be a lot higher than that and you should also include taxes and overhead for another 50%.
Edit: Twitter median employee compensation is $232,626. Assuming they do fire 50% and that's the average of fired employees plus 50% tax and overhead that would come to about $1.3 billion per year. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/ceo-pay-ratio/
$370 million would have made the difference to make 2021 profitable. But now Twitter owns some of the debt incurred to purchase Twitter, adding to their expenses
if you only count tech people, this is too low. If you count all employees, including people paid to review posts or moderate, or handle customer reports etc, it might be too high an estimate.
So if you fired half, which half? If it was the tech employees, i think twitter would save a lot more than your guess, and if it was just the support/moderators, it would not save much money at all imho.
ha ha. No. They're the sneaky one that will have put in thousands of lines of whitespace and punctuation fixes which the software used to fire people will detect as "ultra active". They'll get a promotion and double bonus.
>Oh, fun detail about the layoff email to Twitter employees today. Not only is it unsigned (the signature just says "Twitter"), but the "To" and "From" lines of the email both just say "team (All Full Time Employees)." No one in leadership attached their name in any way.
And are those features going to be developed in the best possible way? If I had ideas for how to revamp a service I would talk to the people who knew how it worked and come up with a plan to develop those features and make a big deal about every feature that got launched. I can also imagine hacking something into production this weekend and getting fired next week. I can't see how demanding big changes like this in a week will result in anything but massive technical debt.
Between the ever increasing "recent tweet" notifications spam that hides my real notifications in the noise and having to use more and more tricks just to preserve a chonological timeline containing only the people I follow and their tweets/retweets, the friction had already reduced my Twitter usage.
And now with the way things are going, this might soon be the final nail in the coffin.
Good thing I still have HN, Reddit and (already way too many) Discord servers.
I guess the company is $1B/year in the hole and they need to close that. Will they get there cutting 3k people and charging $8/verified? The math isn’t too crazy.
-> I made some shitty comments last night about this (firing lots of people) in another thread. I regret them because it was mean. It was meant to be cold in a business is business sort of way, yes, but they came off as mean after I read them again.
you mean: the company now owes $1 billion a year in interest on the debt used to finance the leveraged buyout. musk paid too much and now has to loot the company to afford it
This is weird, wouldn't this give those who think they are likely to be laid off time to to do damage, or plant a dead-employee switch? Obviously it's illegal but usually, don't companies announce layoffs only as soon as they've laid the people off and revoked their access?
Don't worry, they've already revoked access. From further down the article:
> Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data."
Haha "including your spam folder"? These guys are using gsuite email, why would official internal emails be in spam? Are they planning to have some 3rd-party layoff contractor send the mails from Bulgaria or something?
Note that it says if you're let go, the email will come to your personal email. I assume because your access to corporate email will already be revoked.
A more accurate title would have "reducing its workforce" in place of "layoffs". The email does not use that term, which has a different meaning, and different implications.
Musk has said there’s too many managers. But people here think he’s firing talented engineers. It sounds like they are culling the many layers of management and flattening the company out.
It's typical for unvested RSUs to accelerate and vest on change in control. Based on the 10k, there were about $2.2B worth of unvested RSUs at the start of 2022. Musk's $44 billion likely covered some or all of that (or whatever % vested and/or wasn't already forfeited) so it's unlikely there is any real savings. Unless some of those RSUs converted to Private MuskBucks, then he may be saving something.
Allegedly Twitter employees with unvested RSUs were scheduled to get equivalent cash payouts on the same schedule as RSU vesting. I don’t think this will solve his debt problems, but it’s gonna move the needle.
I am OK with Twitter sucking as a service than such chaos and poor employee treatment. As much as I like Elon, companies don't need to be run as inhumane productivity furnaces.
How Elon operates may be appropriate at Tesla and SpaceX, but not everywhere.
I really don’t understand this comments madness for Twitter.
There are dozens of threads in HN regarding recent layoffs, but here we have the explosive mixture of Twitter and Elon Musk.
I understand you don’t like the guy, and that’s completely fine, but many arguments here are totally unreasonable.
Hundreds of CEO did the same thing in the past years and that’s capitalism my friends, deal with it.
Twitter was (and still is) a completely disaster in terms of management and lazy people, and needs a “cleaning” to survive.
No, go with the downvotes, I don’t care. This is insane.
Top talent would have already left by now. Others wait for severance (which may be pitiful in this case). I watched this long ago, and see it repeated.
On the flipside, HN threads get very confusing when new information surfaces hours after hitting the front page. New arrivals start "correcting" people who commented with out of date information.
Yeah, it is getting quite boring since all of this market chaos was expected and as you can see, everyone here being surprised that these layoffs in general are happening. The news need an outrage story to get clicks and eyeballs for their ad money, so why not give Twitter and Elon Musk more attention and drama? It is the same pattern.
But I don't think a social network with a head count of more than 7500+ and increasingly burning hundreds of millions of cash, nearing into the billions for years is sustainable. The layoffs where going to happen either way; with or without Musk's takeover of Twitter.
But of course I couldn't care less on what happens to Twitter, Elon Musk can do whatever he likes with it and yet the screeching loudmouths relying on Twitter will end up screaming in outrage and will calm down and end up paying for their verified checkmarks.
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