One ongoing thread might be better, but it's hard to argue that this is not big tech news. HN users cut through the noise of Twitter replies, and I enjoy reading what they have to say, so I'm having to search "Twitter" in HN's search and sort by "last 24 hours."
Same.. but HN has opportunity to grow and adopt to different styles of communities. I believe eventually people here will find a different home that doesn't "censor" what is on the front page while at times allowing a bunch of PR-based posts to trend.
This is all over twitter, one of the biggest tech stories in a long time while very relevant to corporate culture in general - but there´s almost dead silence here?
That said the story and musk shenanigans in general is also quite annoying at this point.
I've been wondering the same thing. It's the first time I've ever noticed something like this. But Twitter stories appear to be getting buried for some reason.
I think of it as "HN has anti-engagement algorithms to avoid single topics from getting too much front page space in a period of time."
Note that there's also a secret page of /pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool ) that has articles that are considered for being given a second shot.
It was overwhelming the site a few days ago, but I assume the mods weighed it down to make room for other, better stories. Rubbernecking the slow train wreck that is the collision of Elon Musk's ego with the brutal reality of his technical limitations may be fun and cathartic for a certain kind of personality, but it isn't exactly gratifying to intellectual curiosity.
Sounds like everyone can work from home now, because he said only exceptional work is a passing grade.
Finally the first piece of good news coming out of Twitter. Why didn’t he just start with this email rather than anonymously laying off half the company and picking fights with engineers on Twitter, though now I guess people have a crystal clear picture of the culture they’re choosing to stay at, it would have been much more humane to start with this.
Sounds like a lot of people will choose this path, I wonder how many will be left.
Absolutely. He has the freedom to abuse; they have the freedom to walk away. Americans seem to think this leads to a virtuous circle instead of a vicious one.
As for what it does in this case... we'll see. Will he get a bunch of superhero 10x programmers sleeping under their desks? Or will all the superheroes leave, reducing him to the ones who are afraid of finding a new job and being bad at it until he fires them?
Thus far he seems all stick and no carrot, but perhaps he's got something up his sleeve.
I was Six Sigma trained in a former job. It's a lot of statistical process control, defect reduction, and process redesign. You could certainly use it to create a dystopia for your workforce, but it's not in any way intrinsic to the method. Where I was trained it was mostly used in a Toyota-like way to get relatively junior employees engaged in making things work better. Empowering rather than the other way around, I'd say.
Yeah, for some reason people think six sigma is a management technique and immediately hate on it. It's really just applying the stuff Deming and others had already established.
The only chance of him being lionized is if he turns Twitter into a high profit generating enterprise. It doesn’t look like the chance for that is high at the moment.
I don't envy the remaining folks at Twitter at all.
Imagine employees getting this survey and thinking I want to get out but what if this is trap? By opting for leaving I would be outing myself as not 'hardcore'.
Mr. Musk gets a database of self declared 'disengaged' employees. He chooses to scrap the offer (there is no legal binding) and then over next few months pressures them to quit without any severance.
This is why you build up a healthy emergency reserve. If I were a Twitter employee, I'd take the severance instantly. If it pays off, great. If it doesn't, then I'm financially comfortable enough that I can leave a rudderless organization and I take my services elsehwere.
I find it highly doubtful anyone would damage their employment prospects by accepting severance and leaving. I wouldn’t want to work anywhere that thought this way.
>Musk added that Twitter would be “much more engineering-driven” under his ownership and that “those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team”.
Hard to think that those writing great code would be open to be abused, giving how in demand their skills are.
He keeps firing even the engineering staff that survived the first wave of layoffs. It seems like a stretch on his part to think that those left (who, again, just watched a ton of their colleagues/friends be laid off or summarily terminated) are going to put up with the promise of even worse treatment going forward.
> Hard to think that those writing great code would be open to be abused, giving how in demand their skills are.
Are they? The layoffs in tech have been... extensive. Engineers are more in demand than journalists right now, but the climate now is pretty dubious compared with only a few months ago.
Surely if they're the best, they can get a job somewhere else, probably for lower pay, where they aren't abused, regardless of the macroeconomic situation.
If you are relying on the medical insurance and have extra factors like having a family leaving without having another job lined up already is quite a risk, both actual and perceived.
Does severance include any upcoming stock grants? If no, could be another reason to try and stick it out hoping for some sanity to prevail.
If people who claim Musk is playing a four dimensional chess game turn out to be right, then I cannot help but guess that his end-goal must be to stress the importance of unionizing.
This just seems to be simple 2D chess where he wants to fire more people but can't because of labor laws or something and wants to drive people out this way.
I'm a heavy Twitter user and it's sad to watch it CFIT in real-time but I hope everyone with the option to do so takes the severance and gets out of there.
I'm having a hard time figuring out why everyone is up in arms—the guy wants to change the course of an openly-languishing product and thinks it should be more engineering-focused. if it were anyone else, or even if it was the same person saying it but a few years ago instead of today, I would think a statement like this would be lauded here.
what causes people to perceive this as "abuse", a "toxic environment", a "nightmare", rather than plain ol' leadership?
are we so far gone as a society that wanting to improve things through hard work is just a completely foreign concept to us now?
what the fuck happened in these past few years to make us this way?
It's the part where he says employees will need to be "extremely hardcore" and "work long hours at high intensity" with "only exceptional performance constituting a passing grade."
First, I humbly recommend you stop accusing others of being "programmed" in negative ways. It's presumptuious and makes me wonder if you're asking in good faith. Second, I would not end comments with "what the fuck happened" as it sounds condescending, as if you're on the "good side" looking down on the others and shaking your head.
With that out of the way, I think hard work is great. Making something cool is what gets me up and to work every day. What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours." To me, that implies having to work for more than a typical work day and with little slack for any hiccups. Add to that the expectation that anything less than "exceptional performance" is a failing grade. Taken together it strikes me as a recipe for burnout and anxiety. At a minimum I don't see how it's possible to have any sort of work life balance in that arrangement.
Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter. I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations. Of course fairness has nothing to do with it, it's Elon's company. Still, that doesn't maen he's free from criticism.
I have no problems with this email but many problems with his behavior. The ultimate authoritarian is clashing with what was a bloated staff that managed a product allegedly losing $4 million per day. There needs to be drastic changes. He is being extremely transparent that their culture and previous ways of working are changing and offering a generous package to people if they don't like what they hear. I agree with you that it's a recipe for burnout and anxiety and turnover, which has plagued his other companies.
Many things can be true simultaneously. Many of the Elon criticisms are valid: Cruel and puerile behavior on Twitter, shockingly bad product decisions that any associate PM would avoid. Many of the criticisms are unclear: dismantling of teams like "Responsible AI," which sounds like a navel-gazing college course, not an organization in a company. Many of the criticisms are stupid: Cutting free meals that nobody was eating, implementing return-to-office.
> First, I humbly recommend you stop accusing others of being "programmed" in negative ways. It's presumptuious and makes me wonder if you're asking in good faith. Second, I would not end comments with "what the fuck happened" as it sounds condescending, as if you're on the "good side" looking down on the others and shaking your head.
I'm observing a noticeable societal shift that I have directly experienced occurring within my lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that this shift is wholly organic. like I said elsewhere in the thread, this demoralization and disintegration of innately self-evident core values like "working hard to make a good thing good is good" is exactly how I would poison the well of an adversarial nation that I wanted to destabilize at the foundational level.
it's quite nice to see some pushback against this.
> What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours."
> Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter.
I'm confused. you're an indie game developer, and I don't know the details of your team and project, but that entire field is basically built on hard work, long hours, high-intensity effort, and yet you find it fulfilling, despite the great personal risk usually associated, especially being indie.
so why do you think it's impossible that someone else would find a job of this level of intensity but cranked up a notch, but compensated for with a large salary and lavish benefits, to be a compelling job prospect? like I'm with you, that proposition doesn't sound like a great personal fit for me, either—but why is it unthinkable that anyone would find the job compelling? you know as well as I do that, on some level, the entire video game development industry "preys on" developers' love of the medium and feeling of satisfaction caused by creating something cool after oftentimes plural years of development before having a concrete product to show for all the work you put into it. why is that OK for the video game industry, but not for social media companies?
> I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations.
I can see this, but also, how long was the Musk buyout deal in the works? how many months? of course, all the while, almost literally everyone on HN told themselves and everyone else, over and over again in comments threads, the deal will never happen, there's no way it'll go through, ahaha look at this new roadblock that came up, Elon will never get past this one! (seriously, go back in the archives and take a look at some of those threads, the self-assured self-righteous agreement that the deal would never happen is pretty crazy to look back on now.)
any Twitter employee who was ideologically opposed to Elon Musk had plenty of time to look for another job in the case that he actually completed the buyout. of course I'm sympathetic to anyone suddenly losing their job, to some extent, but this sympathy is balanced out somewhat by vindication at seeing bloated "tech companies" finally getting some fat trimmed such that someone who works at a company like Twitter—making much more money than I do at my job—actually has to work hard to earn the paycheck and benefits they enjoy.
> Elon will never get past this one! (seriously, go back in the archives and take a look at some of those threads, the self-assured self-righteous agreement that the deal would never happen is pretty crazy to look back on now.)
I mean... he literally tried to weasel his way out of the purchase agreement until it became clear that the courts weren't going to let that happen? I'm not sure this is the dunk you seem to think it is.
is it not interesting when hundreds of people are absolutely convinced that something is impossible, and then it happens anyway? is that not cause for reflection and introspection, to figure out how so many people could be wrong about something? is that not just standard operating procedure for anyone who makes any sort of prediction/assertion that turns out to be inaccurate, in order to assess things more accurately in the future?
I guess we just remember things differently. For sure there was a lot of disbelief around the internet when Elon made his original offer because who in their right mind would pay that much money for Twitter? But once it became clear that the money was there it was also clear that Twitter's board had a fiduciary duty to accept. At that point the only obstacle was Musk himself, presumably having realized that he had handcuffed himself to a questionable business deal in a fit of pique. Cue the months of hemming and hawing, lawyering etc. until finally Musk knew there was no way out.
that is indeed more or less the story as it was told here, Statler & Waldorf-style, laughing at and ridiculing the dumb billionaire for making every possible decision as completely and utterly incorrectly as possible, every step of the way… but built into that story is a lot of assumptions about motivations and expectations that we simply are not privy to no matter how much we pretend otherwise. also the story changed halfway through from "there's no way he's ever going to be able to buy it" to "ahahaha now he's so fucked he HAS to buy it!". all of this was very emotion-driven and sensationalized, in ways that many people, myself included, assessed as being less and less reality-based as time went on, in ways that curiously mirrored other formally similar incidents from previous years.
again, taking a step back and reflecting on things can lead to the discovery of such patterns repeated across recent history, which leads to key insights about how and why these overemotional public melodramas play out the way they do.
> disintegration of innately self-evident core values like "working hard to make a good thing good is good"
Working hard is necessary to make something good, of course. Working "hardcore", where 100-hour weeks are _required_, and only "exceptional" performance is acceptable, is _inhuman_.
I'm saying this as someone who's managed several teams over several years, but also someone who's read the literature: the surest way to get bad performance out of someone is to put that kind of pressure on them, _especially_ long-term. People in that situation get tired and/or sick, can't straight from the anxiety and pressure, and because of all of that that they'll make simple mistakes that take a long time to sort out (because everybody else is in the same situation).
In my experience the best work comes from people who are calm, healthy, and well-rested, _especially_ over the long term. Those well-rested people are the ones who are capable of putting in the discretionary effort to make something good.
> Working "hardcore", where 100-hour weeks are _required_, and only "exceptional" performance is acceptable, is _inhuman_.
this is something you and everyone else read into the email that was simply not written there. out of curiosity, what drives you to take "hardcore" and "this will mean working long hours" just about as exaggeratedly, hyperbolically uncharitably possible? I can't find a valid logical reason for doing this, yet everyone seems to be doing it, and I can't figure it out.
This is literally what Musk did first thing when he stepped into Twitter premises. He told teams to ship a feature in a short timespan or be fired, which required them to work over the weekends and sleep at their desk.
It's not a case of "hard work is bad". It's a case of forcing your employees to work an unhealthy number of hours, on pain of sacking, should be illegal. It certainly would be in the EU, where an employer must ensure staff do not work over 48 hours/week on average.
If you are willing to work significantly over normal work hours, for market value pay for a company with no greater mission beyond selling ads so that Elon can service the interest on his debt then by all means go for it. That is literally cuckold behavior but some people are into that so if that works for you good for you.
I know my value and won't work in that type of environment.
I didn't want to use that word but that's the only thing that comes to mind describing what you are saying.
Why in the world would you find it acceptable to work at a place where the baseline is extreme hours and where extreme hours are required for just an acceptable performance review if you have other options?
I have worked extreme hours in many jobs but that has always been because either it was an exceptional situation or I was doing it of my own accord. Other than those two situations the only other reason I would do it is either:
1 I am working at a startup (preferably it's my own or I own a lot of equity)
2 I needed the job that badly
3 There was some "higher mission" associated with the work (eg manned space travel to mars, rushing to find a vaccine)
2 doesn't apply to twitter engineers and 3 certainly doesn't apply since twitter whose "higher mission" is selling ads.
There's a big difference between hard work- of which I have done plenty- and completely sacrificing yourself to a role. What Musk is signalling with his language is abusive and unnecessary to achieve any reasonable goal.
The fact that exempt employees are increasingly realizing that it's effectively wage theft when a company forces you to work long grueling hours for the same rates and it steals years off of your personal life to feed the ambitions of an insane CEO.
Perhaps instead of calling it 'hard work' you should call it what it is: Stealing. There's a reason why people fought violently for eight hour work days.
if I wanted to covertly and nonviolently destroy a society, that is exactly the kind of thing I would propagandize said society's populace into believing—that being asked to work hard to make something good at your hard-to-attain job (that you managed to attain while thousands of others were turned away!!) working for one of the biggest and most influential social media websites in the world, is somehow "abusive", "labor theft", "toxic", etc.
telling Twitter employees to work hard and possibly for long hours at their well-paying job with apparently tons of great benefits is not the same thing as telling Industrial Revolution minimum-wage poor-working-conditions steel mill workers or whatever that they have to work 80 hours a week or get fired, yet that seems to be the lens you're viewing this through, which greatly confuses me.
I understand that you likely have a wholly different political lens in general that you view the world through, compared to myself (and most other people), but still, it's not really a gulag or concentration camp if you're being paid upwards of $100k a year (and can freely leave to find a different job if at any point you don't like the way things are going!), so any allusions in that vein are hard to take seriously.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I noticed you said:
> "and possibly for long hours"
Why did you add the word possibly? The email explicitly says "this will mean working long hours".
(I think work ethic and long hours are totally fine! But if a billionaire comes in, fires half of his staff, and then says the remaining ones need to work long hours to make his company a success... we can just acknowledge that, without softening his message.)
completely fair point, but also the email said "this will mean working long hours", not "this will mean that everyone at the company is going to be working long hours, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year", which is how everyone else seems to be taking it. I read it more as "there will be times where we will crunch" (which I know is complete blasphemy these days).
Alright then, do you currently work 14+ hour days seven days a week for your current employer or do you just like to tell other people how to work without doing the work yourself?
Because if you're working long hours and not getting proper overtime pay for those hours then yes you are being cheated out of pay. And companies bleed employees when they do things like this for a reason: Because they can get similar or better pay with better working hours. It's a worker's market right now and you better believe people are going to take advantage of it.
I'm not telling anyone how to work. that is what you are doing:
> it's effectively wage theft when a company forces you to work long grueling hours for the same rates and it steals years off of your personal life to feed the ambitions of an insane CEO.
> Perhaps instead of calling it 'hard work' you should call it what it is: Stealing.
you're explicitly stating that the standards that Elon Musk is setting for his employees, just by saying "this will mean working long hours", are unilaterally, inherently unjust.
when you work at an hourly pay rate and your boss/supervisor tells you to work more hours than usual at no additional pay, that is obviously exploitative.
salaried positions are completely different, and it is disingenuous to pretend like this is not the case. it is true that the social contract between Twitter employees and their employer is in the process of changing, but that is being made explicit to the employees, and they are being asked to either agree to the changes or leave the company.
what exactly is wrong with this?
where exactly is the "labor theft"?
> And companies bleed employees when they do things like this for a reason: Because they can get similar or better pay with better working hours. It's a worker's market right now and you better believe people are going to take advantage of it.
and that is absolutely fine! there is absolutely no reason why a Twitter employee who does not agree to the new terms put forth by their boss should stay with the company. and there's nothing compelling them to do so!
but why should those who do agree to the new terms like shamed or told their labor is being stolen or whatever, just for finding the new terms under which they receive payment in exchange for their labor to be satisfactory? the decision is wholly up to these employees to make personally, on an individual basis. anything else is "telling people how to work".
I don't get your hyperbolic angle that pushing back against Elon Musk is society destroying.
I agree that Twitter was bloated with benefits, but this was the industry's rewarding of their labor aristocrats. It's unfair against anyone who couldn't make it there (like me too) but this is how the industry retained talent so far.
Now these benefits are being taken away. This may be fair to everyone else in the industry, and this is something big tech was already looking to cut during this economic turmoil.
Now this is the real point of contention with Elon Musk. Anyone who's left after morale exhausting job cuts is going to be worked to the bone. They have been enjoying benefits that they don't have anymore, but the wider industry also does not work people this hard.
Is it fair that the best companies should work their people this hard? At the very least this may return results quickly in the short-term to pay off the debt from buying Twitter, but how sustainable is this? Amazon Warehouses are the best in delivering packages quick, but they churn through workers through harsh conditions and they are running out of a labor pool to recruit from. Would Twitter be able to retain talent in the long run? Should the entire industry be run like this?
This then gets to the broader question of the recent societal trend you have been seeing. It's really a collective response to the question of whether society is taking care of the people working for keep it going. The answer for a lot of people is that society has been taking more and more from them. Their wages largely haven't been keeping up with increases in productively. Newer generations are being less economically involved than older ones. A foreign adverse nation does not have to be involved when the nation is already rotting from the inside and people can smell it.
