Key Provision: "Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. ...."
Penalties for Violation: "A possible civil penalty of $500 a day for each day of violation. Employees may receive back pay to be paid at employee’s final rate or 3 year average rate of compensation, whichever is higher."
Considering breaking the law is one of Musk's seemingly favorite hobbies, I wouldn't be so sure on a WARN notice. The punishments for non-compliance isn't very much.
There are rarely laws that say you may not kill another person. There are typically laws that lay out the consequences if you are found guilty of murdering someone, through a designation (eg if it's a felony offense, and what type of felony).
Whether you're guilty of murder or not is of course established after the fact. And you can do nothing wrong in the act of killing someone and still get screwed by a jury. Just ask the political left what they think of Kyle Rittenhouse being innocent.
You can certainly follow the law and go to jail regardless.
Doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle. From some Googling:
"Employers who fail to provide notification must provide their laid-off employees with back pay and benefits for the period of the violation (which means the amount of time by which their advance notice fell short of 60 days)."
The value of ripping off the Band-Aid could easily be worth two months of severance in his mind.
My understanding is that this was a take private so all stock was acquired already (ie vested options get paid and unvested get terminated at Close).
This is exactly what would happen if you acquired our company. It’s not like a purchaser would have the honor long term vesting schedules. They bought everything already that was available to be sold. Those who didn’t vest were dragged along into the deal.
Usually, the RSUs are converted to cash and the RSUs schedule is kept the same. The workers which remain int he company receive cash on the same schedule.Hence Letting some people go before the RSU date saves money.
> This is exactly what would happen if you acquired our company.
That is a terrible deal. I've worked at a company where all outstanding RSUs would vest immediately at the time of purchase; was that an unusual arrangement?
The reason they want to lay off today is to avoid the stock grants, so it comes down which $$ was bigger. And honestly they were likely planning for severance anyways...
The layoffs, if any, haven’t even been announced yet and the only sources in the article are anonymous sources who can’t agree with each other about the supposed impending layoff.
I don’t see any reason to suspect they’re going to somehow violate the law and cost themselves additional fines if or when they do it. This is just about speculation about what Musk will eventually do.
My understanding is that the WARN notice does not apply when employees are terminated for cause. This has the extra "benefit" of not having to pay out unemployment claims.
For legal purposes, a separation letter for a for-cause termination must state the specific "cause" for which the employee is terminated.
Termination on the basis of poor performance (legally, "incompetence") requires supporting documentation, such as written reviews of the employees' performance prior to the termination. And legally incompetence only tests the employee's performance at tasks actually within their job description; an employee can't be fired for incompetence at other tasks. Very importantly, a new boss coming in and deciding that employees weren't performing up to his arbitrary (and new) standards doesn't pass muster.
A mass layoff for "performance" reasons has never been sustained by a labor department. The penalty is $500 for each day of violation (meaning each day short of the 60 required by the Warn ACT), plus all salary and bonuses that would have been paid during the 60 day period, plus legal fees incurred by the employees to protect their rights.
Additionally, a "for cause" termination on performance (or any other grounds) opens the employer up to per se libel lawsuits. Literally, all the employee has to do is submit a copy of the termination letter into evidence and they win unless Twitterlon can demonstrate that the employee was actually incompetent.
I was laid off from another company under a warn notice in NY and I went home the first day and kept getting paid with full benefits for 3 months. I then got a redundancy payment. It was under the condition I couldn't work for another company.
Given that none of this is official, and there are at minimum 3 different reports about the quantity and timeline of layoffs I dont think anyone is concerned about a WARN notification
I beat even Elon, at this moment, does not have a full accounting of what the layoffs will be. This is all just pure media hype and nonsense with very little basis in truth or reality
> The company has yet to release a formal announcement of the acquisition. The communications department has gone silent. Rumors have swirled about layoffs, with some notices going out quietly.
Is it just me or is this headline totally misleading?
Why is the headline misleading? You don't need a formal announcement for something to be news. Particularly since the formal announcement being referred to there is just the announcement that Twitter was acquired by Musk.
> ...according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved.
Given everything over the last decade, people should not trust anything when it involves a) highly controversial/partisan/breathless news and b) dealing in anonymous sources and rumors.
I think we can rely on peoples' own smarts to build in that skepticism. There's not a lot of benefit to qualifying every piece of information to say that it might be wrong.
It comes down to, do you trust that WaPo properly vetted the sources, and do you believe that the sources, whether they were in a position to be credible or not, were acting on solid information?
E.g. according to Business Insider Facebook should have fired half the company, according to “sources”, but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge yet
Asking sources to publish their name is a very sure way to not have sources at all.
Quote Orwell, Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. You need to get people to tell you about all those things, and as that someone who dislike them being printed has power (it ain't news otherwise,) you need to find a way to make people talk to you. "Help me to rekt your career and life" just don't cut it.
I understand that, and maybe the activists pretending to be journalists should have thought about that before burning the public's trust by just taking any sensationalized "source" with no vetting and reporting on it as fact.
The "media" did this to themselves, now at this point no one would trust any news story that is only validated with "anonymous sources" as the media has proven they are either incapable of vetting these sources for truthful info, or do not actually have any sources at all and are just making shit up for the clicks
Either way they have given the public no reason to trust them at this point
It's amazing how people still trust these "according to people familiar with x" articles after the past 5+ years. Like 99% of them have been wrong and just used to push a political agenda.
“Twitter plans to lay off…” would probably be a more precise headline, yes. It’s more than speculation, though, but you do have to trust the reporters on that.
We've changed the title to what the article says now. I don't know whether WaPo changed their own title or the submitted title was editorializing (the latter is against the HN guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Would anything let him change the deal at this point? Even if Twitter was hiding their bot problem Elon's initial offer waived his ability to do due diligence on this, no?
He's a vindictive little man, even if he is stuck with Twitter at the price he paid, he probably wants revenge.
Any evidence about information he didn't see will be fair game to claim witholding information from the court. And maybe a sec fraud indictment against those that were at the helm of Twitter.
He wouldn't be able to change the deal, but a lawsuit against the previous board/executives is possible.
The entire waiving of due diligence thing is also such a weird talking point. There was no contingency on due diligence, but part of the deal did include access to the information he would need to do it and any incorrect information in public filings should have been enough to get out of the deal.
If I were Elon there is zero chance I’d be able to resist name-searching myself in the company Slack, just in public channels and channels I was added to. I can’t blame him for that.
Tweeting it out, well. I could resist that urge just fine.
It’s reporting on information the authors received from sources who would not speak on the record. It’s entirely possible that the four anonymous sources are the four people in the meeting (Musk et al) and they’re speaking on background because they haven’t made a formal announcement yet.
Yeah it would be horrible if one day we had a press like that. In this case I expect they simply didn’t have enough moveable type to include “Rumor:” at the start of the headline
It's a rumour if you hear it from a friend of a friend. It sounds like they have several credible sources. Whether you trust their vetting of what constitutes a "credible source" is another matter.
The precursor was this recent WaPo article Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said [1] which hinted at the cuts.
For salaried, at-will employment, the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want. There are exceptions for, like, sexual harassment and racial discrimination, but not for "I disagree with the boss about what is a realistic project timeline".
The nice thing is that this goes both ways. If you are an at-will employee you can send an email that says "I resign effective immediately" and walk away and never speak to anyone at that company ever again.
It is the definition of symmetrical. Both parties can cut ties at any time without any warning.
In general employers are able to benefit from this symmetrical relationship more often though since they are only losing a small percentage of their workers while the employee is losing 100% of the income they were getting from that employeer.
Symmetry can exist on one axis but not another. Sure it's symmetrical on the "actions an entity can take axis", but when people refer to the employee/employer relationship being asymmetrical they are discussing the risk or impact axis.
Depends on the role, the company, and the timing. A single worker in an important position leaving on the spot, dropping some critical work half-way done and taking all the context and specific knowledge with them, could easily torpedo a million dollar deal. Or, a single employee leaving could trigger a cascade, and soon you're short a whole project team.
In general, I'd say at-will still favors employers, who are in a better position to structurally mitigate the threat of a critical employee leaving, even though they often don't do so.
I'll note that a company that depends on a single employee like this has failed to plan and is already in trouble. No matter how well you treat them, your critical employees will leave. You might be able to pay them well enough to limit the risk on them taking another job (though few employers do) but even with that sooner or later they'll win the lottery, get hit by a bus, or just retire.
A business can and must hedge against critical employees leaving. It's much harder as an employee to hedge against your employer giving you the boot.
As an example to further illustrate your point, it is possible for a business to purchase key employee insurance. As an employee we do not have the same privilege.
It's just a nitpick and it doesn't impact GP's point all that much, but: surely employees in the US have some sort of job loss insurance - if not standalone, then attached to a mortgage or life insurance?
It's usually unemployment insurance and it's provided by the state (literally, it'll be the state the employee resides in - here's California's: https://edd.ca.gov ).
There ARE "insurance" products that will "defer your credit/mortgage payments in case of a job loss" - they are almost all universally some form of scam (or at least a very bad "insurance").
I think it’s the state of the employer but I’m not sure. After all that’s who is paying into the fund. At least that’s what I remember when I looked into it when I was living in a different state than my employer and things were looking precarious.
I'm out of state compared to my employer and they had to establish a "nexus" or something because I am here, which required them to do something like register as a business and withhold state tax; I assume they're paying into some sort of unemployment in my state for me. All of those things became much more important when Covid hit, but cross-border employment has been big in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, etc for a long-time, so it's a solved problem (by someone).
I was commuting across state lines at the time. Never looked deeply as I left before it became relevant and it was what it was in any case. MA would have been more than NH and I thought it would be NH but not sure why.
But the bigger point is that unemployment insurance is very little money compared to a good professional salary.
Interesting. My personal experience is with a loss of job insurance I had to buy as a condition on my mortgage, which did have somewhat reasonable terms. I also noticed options for this on life insurance, but never pursued them.
I suppose the ultimate protection a person has is savings, and it's likely more cost-effective than any form of insurance - except it's hard in practice for most people, partly because they barely have any disposable income, and partly because it requires the degree of self-control many (if not most) don't have (and the overall culture isn't encouraging it).
Not really. There’s unemployment insurance. But in NH for example to pick one state I’m familiar with, the maximum is $427 per week for 26 weeks. Some other states are certainly more but for someone in a high paying job it’s not much. So a max of about $11,000. I’m familiar with other insurance other than your own savings.
Employees have exactly this - it's called "Unemployment Insurance". YMMV depends on which state you live in, but many states, mandate employers pay into this so that when an employee is let go, they receive compensation.
You can debate whether it's enough or fair or whatever, but insurance against unemployment does exist for employees.
If one employee quitting takes out your whole team, the problem isn't the employee that quit. Something is seriously wrong with your working environment and the whole thing was balanced on a knife edge.
> In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.
I have a friend who several years ago who was laid off with 3 months severance. They left feeling cheerful, telling people that if they couldn't find a job in 3 months, they deserved to be fired. Fortunately it only took slightly longer than 3 months and it's something we can laugh about now. The whole "it'll be easy to find a job with this skill-set" is true right up until it's not and is a risky backup plan.
Employees often depend on prior employers as references and for social connections. It is rare that anyone would actually walk out without notice, as doing so would almost always hurt their careers even if that job was truly shitty (the old adage to “never burn bridges” does apply!).
Employers do not experience this same effect. Even if lots of people get laid off from a company without notice, there will almost always be people who are willing to take new jobs there.
I have not heard of any other developers needing to furnish references either. Just ask on HN or Reddit or Twitter, most devs will say they're not needed.
Mainly because many companies now have policies that will only communicate three things about former employee: time employed, ending salary, and eligibility for re-hire.
You might make an assumption from the last item, but without specific details and by the time you might be confirming employment the ineligibility for rehire likely will not disqualify the candidate…especially if other former employers have you tagged as eligible.
I’ve worked in many positions where I had unique knowledge. If the company fired me without notice, I’d have a new job within a few days.
If I quit without notice, high revenue systems could fail or not launch.
I kind of like software because of this. An individual has great value. Of course, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that fires people Willy nilly.
But for software at-will can definitely be asymmetric benefiting the employee. Software developers aren’t replaceable cogs.
This causes minimal hard to a business and zero harm to Musk's ability to afford yachts. But a very large number of employees have jobs because they need to pay rent and buy food. Losing that job is a significant change to their lives. Software engineers are more likely to have large savings that make it easier for them to say "fuck you" to their boss and leave but in general this system of at will employment is not actually balanced.
That unemployment rate is nonsense. If you want a job that does not pay you enough to even afford a studio apartment in many locales then yes there are multiple jobs ready to take you. Hell they'll even provide you some free (candy\pens\fast food\a pat on the back) to further tempt the deal. For everyone else that unemployment rate is a mirage.
Everything in life is tradeoffs. American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money.
> American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money.
Of course, this comment is predicated on the assumption that America's loose labour laws are the reason for this salary disparity, and I'm not personally willing to follow you to that conclusion.
I think it's far more likely that American software engineers get paid more because the industry was effectively born there, and it was born there due to historical accidents like the US being where the transistor was invented, the advancement of technology due to government spending during World War II and the subsequent space race, etc, not to mention the US being the center of the VC world, which has its own deep history.
A tradeoff can exist without implying that the tradeoff is necessary.
In other words, America has A but not B, Europe has B but not A, and there doesn't happen to be a place with both A and B, but it's not impossible in principle. Workers would still need to decide if they value A or B more, even if in a perfect world they could have both.
Fair enough. I took the parent comment to be implying that that tradeoff was necessary--i.e. to have high salaries you have to have loose labour laws--as opposed to a simple statement about the current world we live in.
If it's the latter, absolutely you are right, and it is certainly the case that tech employees today are forced to make the choice between New York/California tech salaries and strong labour laws, regardless of whether or not there's a necessary inverse relationship between those two things.
If you can fire low performers, average performance will be higher, which means average pay will be higher. The risk is that you personally get mistaken for (...or correctly assessed as...) a low performer. Hence, tradeoffs.
American software engineers * in unicorns from SV *. They have their own scale which is not really a national thing. Then you also have to adjust for the cost of living / not included insurances etc.
Just because American SWEs are able to exploit the current workers paradigm in the US due to eye-watering amounts of money from VCs and the state of ad-tech doesn't mean jack shit for any at-will salaried employee that isn't paid in truck-loads of equity.
There are states in the US where teacher's unions are out-lawed. US workers don't have rights. I have a feeling you might feel differently if not part of the segment of the working class that happens to be seeing benefits atm.
Hyperbole, but ... a quick look at the Wikipedia article on Wisconsin's 2011 law [1] looks like the next best thing (e.g., yearly votes to retain union).
> Collective Bargaining: The law limits collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases cannot exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Increases from the bargaining process for teachers are applied only to the base wages, and do not include the additional salary of teachers. Contracts are limited to one year and wages frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units must take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers cannot collect union dues, and members of collective bargaining units are not required to pay them.
To offer a bit of counter-perspective, do keep in mind that while American SWEs do get paid more on the average, the costs of living in the US are also sky-high the areas where big software companies operate.
Yes, in the EU I get paid a lot less, but the cost of living in Europe is also not nearly as expensive (although we also do pay more taxes). That's not even accounting for job security or workers rights, I seem to just have more money left over each month on average than any Americans I know of in the same industry because the cost of living is just lower and I have less heavy unexpected expenses (healthcare being the big one of course, but when I hear what US SWEs need to pay just to stay housed and fed, it makes absolutely no sense in prices compared to the EU).
That's not a case of risk aversion, its a case of relative vs absolute pay. In relative pay, the EU pays their employees just straight up better. The US is only better in absolute pay, but that gets drained quickly due to the local economy scaling up to match.
Anytime you compare things anecdotally to people you know be verrry careful. It’s easy to not be comparing apples to apples. Do those people have kids? Rent vs own? How nice of cars? Commute? Sq footage of house? Etc etc. for example, I don’t work for FANG and you probably haven’t heard of my employer, but out of ~300k TC I save 48k cash + 100k stock + ~20k 401k retirement, which I think is pretty good. Tell me if you think I could do better in EU. . And while I live in suburbs of HCOL area, I’m fully remote so could move and save even more. Also remember if you own your house the money is usually not being drained it’s building into an equity nest egg. So at the end of the day the HCOL person will have more wealth even if they have to sell a house and move to use it; that arrow only goes one way (LCOL can’t sell and move to HCOL area and come out ahead).
All of these relationships are two way. If they make a demand to change the expectations of working hours and work time, you say no, I won't do that. They can fire you if they don't like the relationship, but even in the US you're likely to win at least unemployment benefits.
I had a manager like this once. They won’t explicitly ask you to work on the weekends, but the deadline in combination with the workload made it obvious you would be working on the weekend and late nights. So glad I left that toxic place.
They are all exempt employees so they aren't covered by a lot of labor law, such as getting paid "overtime", etc. This is how professional, salaried employment works. Exempt employees tend to be paid very well and have great benefits though.
You can fire an employee for no reason at all since employment is "at will". Musk probably assumes a good deal of the workforce is lazy and/or incompetent and he doesn't want to pay them. So he's figuring out who to fire.
If the terminations are happening for the purpose of depriving employees of stock-related compensation they are about to earn, that may be an illegal reason. For example, you cannot let a salesperson snag a huge deal and then fire him or her to avoid paying the commission - it’s not an “at will” issue.
RSUs only vest if you are an employee the day they vest. If a salesperson wins a deal and you fire them before paying their commission that’s different since they closed the deal first.
It’s very common for companies to let individuals go before bonuses vest.
I would certainly recommend any employee in this situation to get legal counsel. Terminating an employee for the purpose of preventing them from satisfying conditions precedent to a payment is a bad-faith move that some courts will set aside.
There's no legal framework for weekends. They were originally created due to massive labor advocacy and strikes. I imagine since such advocacy has been undermined for decades it makes sense the victories the advocacy fought for are also being clawed back.
In the US, there is a fair amount of respect (in business at least) for the idea of “consent to continue the interaction can be revoked with or without cause at any time”.
I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal outside the rare edge case where there is only a single employer in a geographical region, and even that unfortunate situation should probably be remediated with a different type of government intervention.
Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?
> Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?
No.
Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads.
At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.
There's no law that says the number they give on the sign is the exact number you get on your offer letter and not some "work for us for X amount of time and get Y amount of pay increase over that time" that may (or may not) eventually reach 80k
How does Twitter hold any sway whatsoever over their employees' abilities to meet basic human needs, or their access to healthcare? I think for this to hold true, you have to assume that anyone working there must have zero savings, and no other job prospects.
> I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal
There is a big one: the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship, the employer clearly has more power over where things go. So it's absolutely normal to protect the employee from being asked too much, especially when said employee doesn't benefit from the overtime.
There is a big bias towards taking companies as important citizens whose needs must be catered for, but it's taking more and more importance when the actual citizens aren't listened to. It is important to put companies back to what they are: a social construct for exploiting people and make profit from their work.
It's typically held that the average employer being able to go without a worker in a given position much longer than the average worker can go without a job is what makes it uneven. Saying "no" is far riskier to one side than the other. There also tend to be large information imbalances, in practice.
Even if the firing is legal - and California does have restrictions when a company fires a large number of people at once - arguing that it's "for cause" to withhold severance packages is going to be a lot more difficult.
For the rank and file layoffs yes, you need to have a notice period and those people will probably get severance at least equal to that much pay. But C suite executives are another matter. It’s very likely that Elon Musk received access to information after taking control that supports a for cause dismissal.
I'm all for the European don't work unpaid overtime, but what I don't get is the sense of entitlement these people had, when they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind. "WE WILL SHOW YOU ELON" - Show what exactly? That billing and other completely standard cookiecutter SaaS features can't be implemented by other engineers for what is ultimately a near real-time messaging platform with marketing hooks.
Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.
I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.
"Workers" is strange to me when talking about people who make 5-10x the national average (i.e. make more than many average executives in other industries). They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion. I'm fine with including staff in retail, restaurants etc, but someone making $500k+ a year doesn't fit into that category.
> They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion.
You are (understandably) conflating "worker" with "working class", but these are different contexts. A worker is anyone who must, well, work for a living as opposed to their income coming from property/capital.
Wouldn't you differentiate between workers and executives? Is the CEO a worker if he doesn't own the company?
Tying it to the salary makes sense to me. If you get paid minimum wage, asking you to work overtime without additional pay is unjust. You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
I am not making any argument here about whether this specific incident is fair or whatever. I'm just clarifying how the word "worker" is used in the context of economic and labour theory, and where your blue-collar misunderstanding likely came from.
Yes, I am a well-paid SWE. But I must still work for my salary; my income does not come from owning capital. That's the crucial difference.
> You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
Something on fire? Sure. Regulation means this project must be done Monday? Maybe, thought I'm wondering why management didn't start it sooner. A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
New CEO sets an arbitrary deadline for no reason other than to cull the heard? Fuck that.
"I'm going to _ask_ you to go ahead and come in on Saturday and I'm also going to _ask_ you to go ahead and come in on Sunday and I'm going to keep this stapler."
Executives are different because of their compensation structure. When you're being paid via stock and option grants, money being used to pay "workers" is coming directly out of your pocket, so in this way executives are naturally a different class of employee.
> they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind.
I imagine that at this point, many are staying until they get fired so they can collect severance pay.
That is what I would do. I absolutely would not work for Elon’s Twitter long term unless they paid me a king’s ransom, but I would definitely stick around and jump through the hoops just long enough to get a nice payout.
The pitfalls of extreme comfort. You have a place like the Bay Area with near perfect weather, obscene amounts of money, and at least until relatively recently, a social environment that lorded you as a "rockstar."
You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!"
Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explosive considering large chunks of the millennial generation were already coddled—and yes, I'm a millennial). You get a bunch of entitled brats who view anyone who isn't doing what they're doing as _less than_ (which is ironic considering those "less-thans" keep the bubble they live in running—electricity, food delivery, sewage systems, etc).
Pepper in the absolutely psychotic, cult-level diatribe these people sputter about "changing the world" and "making dents" and you have a low-level Jim Jones field jamboree brewing. It's absolutely zero surprise what's come out of SV over the last decade and change.
And that doesn't even factor in the pharmaceuticals!
Maybe throw in a landmark forum, after you failed your first startup. I've actually seen people walk past hundreds of homeless people in the mission as if they don't exist, only to sit down in a flat in the middle of them to tell your tech buddy (me) that they're changing the world with the next photo sharing app. I had a little dystopia vibe, but then again I grew up in Europe so what do I know.
Oh Lordy…I had a boss send me to a “management seminar that he found exceptional” that turned out to be that train wreck around 20 years ago. I think I lasted maybe an hour before I got up and left in the middle of the session with the speaker yelling at me to sit down (and some rude asshole trying to block me from leaving…unsuccessfully).
I called my boss and told him I left, that I didn’t care if he got a refund, and to fire me if he wanted (he didn’t).
It isn't an entitled attitude to refuse to work over the weekend under threat of losing your job to ship a new feature that isn't actually urgent at the whims of your new CEO who has spent the last few months publicly shitting all over you.
You're correct. I think that behavior is just the flip side of what I described above (instead of entitlement in favor of comfort, entitlement in favor of abusive behavior being shrugged off as "genius at work").
Both behaviors are ignorant and exist in an altered state of reality that's long-term destructive.
If you're being paid $300,000 it is. Some overtime expectation in reasonable or unforeseen situations is not unusual in many places. For blue collar and minimum wage service workers it can just be a way of life.
The idea that an employee doesn't think think they need to work overtime even though the company has just changed ownership, because they think they know better than the company owner what needs to be done, view his requests as "whims", and believe that because the owner had comments and opinions about the company that singled out no engineer or manager by name that they therefore should be allowed to disregard this direction, is one of the most entitled things I've ever heard. Doubly so if they were one of the ones who had spent the past few years personally shitting all over Musk publicly.
You’re almost there - which systemic problems in society are creating this elysium like class system where we jeer about the battles of the ascendant elite vs the shrinking bourgeois in a city where people beg for water on the street?
Most of the national/international media has been scrutinizing Twitter all weekend, specifically looking for signs of layoffs. It seems odd that this person would have scooped them all on that? Not saying it's impossible or anything, but it does make me a little suspicious.
Not that I'd say use them as the only source but they've been a source for other layoffs for a long time and he's usually correct if not always. He's the author of a few Engineering books (The Pragmatic Engineer, etc.) so he gets a lot of inside information from current and past SWEs.
Yesterday it was "lay of 25% of workforce today to avoid paying some bonus thingie that kicks in Nov 1". Well, there's still couple of hours in which this may become true, but I don't expect it, and meanwhile I see the bonus angle has been silently dropped.
It's not a good idea to conflate layoffs of the rank-and-file with the 3 execs that were fired "for cause". At the exec level, it's a whole different ballgame. All of these execs are multi, multi millionaires. I'd honestly be pretty shocked if they don't sue, and at least from what I know now I'd be shocked if they don't win. In exec contracts with golden parachutes, "for cause" clauses are almost always very specific and normally entail breaking the law or company policy. That is, unless these execs were sexually harassing people or stealing money, "We think you did a bad job" won't cross the "for cause" threshold.
Lol, so Musk tweets out one semi-vague private message (one that includes the word "lol"). I wouldn't take that as evidence of shit until it is discussed in court.
Not sure I trust this source. He seems to relay rumours based on second hand sources. At least from Blind, it seems like all reports of employees being fired so far is fake. Not even sure the weekend work story is true.
> Another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters last week said the total number of layoffs is likely to be closer to 50 percent.
Unless I’m missing something, the only sources for this article are a mix of speculation and anonymous sources who can’t even agree with each other about the layoff.
This is mainly media workers exploiting current events for traffic, even if their content is misleading. We really need to sort out media corruption and incompetence.
Personal email, obviously. Never discuss anything of this nature on any communication medium that is owned by your employer. There's a reason "Direct Message" labeling overtook "Private Message" in chat apps.
Depending upon how sensitive I’d generally try to avoid written communications in general. It’s easy for even well-meaning friends, current or ex-workers to forward something without thinking it through.
Did a quick search of Elon + Twitter. Everything they reported seems factual and tied to things that actually happened? If Twitter does lay off a large amount of people will you admit that Washington Post probably had good sources or continue to be continually skeptical?
I think part of wanting a good media atmosphere is rewarding news sources that are shown to be reliable - and I would argue Washington Post is close to that.
Are you disagreeing that layoffs are happening at twitter? Elon told investors it would happen, and he needs to increase profit by $1.5B to stop losing money. Layoffs are guaranteed. The question is will it be 25% as reported or 75% as Elon promised. The answer is we can’t know because nobody knows. It’ll probably something in between.
I am disagreeing that they have happened, or that news sources have any accurate or reportable info on what will happen
They have a bunch of rumors, and panicked employees as "sources" none of which are likely in a position to know anything with any degree of certainty and it is widely irresponsible to report on it as if it was factual
Sometimes people have their own motives and don't always tell you the truth or at least omit to tell you their plans. As a co-worker once told me, welcome to the mud pit along with everyone else you'll be a competitor with while trying to build a career and hopefully a decent product.
WaPo isn't the best of new reporting agencies [0], but it's certainly not the worst. They do have standards and they don't make up the large majority of their data. Meaning, they have actually talked to someone that is 'familiar' with the 'deal' at some point 'last week.' It's not pure speculation on WaPo's part, though it maybe pure-unrefined-grade-A speculation on the contact's part.
If I had to bet, and many HNers out there are currently in that seat, then I'd bet on their reporting over other forms of pure speculation.
Yeah, insiders not knowing the full details of Musk's plan because Musk doesn't have a detailed plan yet seems more likely than WaPo just making some stuff up.
As a casual observer, it appears that he moves very, very quickly. An insider might have read his mind yesterday but not be familiar with his current plan being executed today. Of course this can lead to big results in some cases and erratic chaos in others.
Honestly, that isn't a super convincing source. Every news outlet has a criticism section. For an almost 150 year old organization, that is pretty sparse. Even better some of things in there are non-issues like "Trump repeatedly railed against The Washington Post on his Twitter account." Who didn't he tweet "fake news" at?
News agencies are organizations made of humans that have flaws and we should always treat with a critical eye. But we shouldn't just dismiss one out of hand as not one of the best because of the existence of a "Criticism and controversies" section on Wikipedia especially when it is FAR tamer than many mainstream competitors.
What you say is true, but you seem to be slightly missing the point of the comment you're responding to. That comment didn't say "WaPo is trash, should not be believed." It says "WaPo is neither perfect or terrible, and the information in this article is most likely somewhat accurate"
Can verify that Twitter is laying people off. Several contacts at Twitter were laid off this weekend and hoping they I could submit their resumes to my current employer.
They were told that these were performance based terminations, despite not receiving any negative evaluations during their time at Twitter. They were also told they needed to sign NDAs in order to receive any severance.
Tweeps are being told these are performance-related terminations, not layoffs. It was posited that "performance" was referring to Twitter, not the employee. I simply pointed out that's exactly what a layoff was, and performance in this context can only mean the employee, not the company.
Sometimes, or that could be a partial reason as a signal to current and future employees about what management is like.
But NDA is another reason, or even keeping unemployment insurance premiums low by having everyone that accepts severance state that they are voluntarily leaving the company in exchange for the severance.
By voluntarily separating, they cannot collect unemployment benefits from the state, which means the state charged the employer less in unemployment insurance premiums.
Yes. It makes it easier for them to hire down the road. If you know there is a parachute waiting for you, it’s easier to take a risk on joining the company once it starts growing again.
But I suspect it’s mainly as a carrot to sign the NDA/non-compete/whatever else they want you to sign to keep not talk about what happened.
Usually it is advantageous to offer it so that you don't sue them down the road and get more money. A lot of times it is less rewarding to take the first second or third settlement offer than to counter for quadruple what they offer.
Yes, good will sometimes. Other times it may be all about giving someone a very strong incentive to play nice while they find a new gig. Sometimes people basically need it.
These kinds of things are not always about the strict minimum cost actions. In general, it is a better world with some degree of human consideration being part of things.
I am quite sure many of the cases I had involvement in could have been done cheaper. However, I am also quite sure the people involved had what they need to get through to their next gig with few worries too.
That is worth a lot and these days one can never know who may be working for or with who.
The one time I was laid off I had to sign an NDA and a non-compete to get severance. I signed it because it was a decent severance package, and the company was going bankrupt and I figured there would not be any entity left that would care or try to enforce it.
Not only an NDA - many companies also require you to sign anti-disparagement clauses, meaning you can have severance clawed back if you speak negatively of the company.
Something like that would never hold up in court, in fact it might even make the whole firing illegal in the first place. Unless, of course, so NDA's would also prevent the employer from speaking negatively about the employee, but those are extremely rare.
Do you have any reliable source for this? as it's fairly common in the industry. I know lots of things are common that turn out to be illegal, but this one is ripe to be tested time and again, and the fact that it's still being used implies that those challenges failed.
You might be right but a lot of this stuff is based on the calculation that most people do not have the assets to wage a lengthy legal battle when they’re newly unemployed. I’ve heard a lot of stories about wildly illegal things which either went completely unchallenged or became moot because the company went busy with no assets.
Just realized, but to late to edit, that I based my original comment on my home country. And that is not the US. Over here, even hardcore PIPs are regularly thrown out by courts as grounds for termination.
Not generally. There's no federal severance requirement. I think there might be a few states that require some kind of severance pay under some circumstances, but it's at least not common in the US.
Well to be honest, Musk and his team looked at quantity/quality of code produced in the last 60 days, with hopefully a 10 minute chance to defend their lack of quantity/quality.
Lots of coasters in big companies can get with good rating just be being on the good side of manager/peers and even get Bonus points if you are vocal about DEI and activism.
If some random group of people who don't know me, don't know my labor or my legacy at an organization, don't know my technical abilities, etc. fired me based off the quantity (and subjective quality) of code I produced in the last 60 days, even with 10 minutes to defend myself, I would be spitting mad at the disrespect and dehumanization. Particularly if I know I was being fired days before a stock refresh.
No, this is pissing on people and claiming it's raining.
He had them print off their last 30-60 days of git commits and called himself a "hardcore coder" in DM's with Parag I really doubt he's qualified to comment on the existing infrastructure behind Twitter.
He's a really good marketer, a good businessman but I do not think he knows what he is doing when he requests access to the codebase behind a massively distributed and scalable system such as Twitters backend
twitter could invoke the "faltering company" exemption given that its now saddled with many $B LBO debt, or unexpected contracts loss given that some advertisers are pausing spend.
What is the bar for "familiar with the discussions"? I read a news article about it, does that make me familiar? Does the person setting up the conference room count as familiar?
Numerous employees - how much insight does a web developer at Twitter have into the inner workings of the management shift happening right now?
Photos of what? The conference room? Are we going to pull in a body language expert to analyze what Elon was saying by walking into the room with sneakers instead of dress shoes?
There is no accountability for sources in journalism, and it's why I think it's 99% useless garbage and never read it. Journalists and publications find the sources they want to tell the story they already planned to write regardless of reality.
There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet).
When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters", you need to translate it to something more like the following:
The journalist who wrote this has found a credible source, who has insider knowledge.
That source has requested anonymity, and the journalist finds that request credible.
The journalist then used their skills and experience in writing about this area over the course of their career to evaluate if that source was trustworthy. They also considered if the source had their own motivations which could affect what information they chose to share and why.
The journalist may have then cross-checked that information against other sources of information to help evaluate its credibility. This becomes more important the more high stakes the claim in question becomes.
An editor (and potentially even separate fact checkers) evaluated the statement as well, and applied judgement as to whether it held up firmly enough to be published.
There are so many phrases like this in top-tier journalism. When an experienced journalist reads an article from someone else that says "a senior official in the administration said..." they can often narrow that down to just a dozen or so potential people, based on their knowledge of that beat.
As a non-journalist reading newspapers this is pretty infuriating, because there's this whole language that you need to know about in order to fully understand what's being communicated here.
Every reporter I have ever met (and this especially includes those that went to j-school) at this point just regurgitates press releases or is too scared to bite the hand (or the hands of the golfing buddies, or the advertisers) that signs their paychecks.
Weird, my experience is the opposite. All journalists I met in person and spoke to have been critical towards anything in any way reasonable. Including their bosses and institutions. It's a merit of journalism for introspection to be normal and wanted.
I could believe you, but unfortunately journalists have trashed their credibility with their turn to "moral clarity" post-Trump. With the effective merger of the opinion and news beats in this era, "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters" could refer to anybody at all with a grudge against Musk, and we as readers would have no way of knowing which of the cases it is if the source's motivations align with WP's editor's motivations (to denigrate Musk). This report is from a paper that still employs Taylor Lorenz as a "columnist covering technology and online culture" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/), when her main beat is more about being the moral enforcer of the progressive media's opinions on tech, online culture, trans issues, etc.
On the flip side, I believe everyone understands what you wrote. But it requires faith that the author and editors are writing in good faith, which has been decreasing for a long time.
Click bait headlines, stories with weak fact checking or even printing outright lies has decreased (at least my) trust in news articles and has resulted in me questioning facts and anonymous quotes more frequently(which may be a good thing).
Also, fairly reputable sources that produce mostly good quality journalism will slip in misinformation or hit pieces at the behest of political and corporate entities.
Examples are the New York Times writing a hit piece against Tesla, where it turned out they had driven the car in circles in a parking lot for hours to get the battery to run out, but didn't think that Tesla might be able to get data on what they did. Turns out the author of the article works for the oil industry. The NYT also regularly publishes as fact things told to them by the Pentagon and three letter agencies, rather than calling the information alleged.
They don't have to make up a source to be taken for a ride. Look at CNBC eating up the story about two guys (Ligma and Johnson) who were supposedly fired. If the source is anonymous we can't check they worked at Twitter.
Generally more than one person is checking employment documents on published news stories (not tweets). Not saying it never happens but it just doesn't happen with enough regularity to assume every anonymous source is fake.
I don't believe this at all. I think there's different tiers of journalism. One tier is going to publish "anonymous person says X" and that tier will be fast, sensational, and less accurate. Another tier is going to publish experts on the record and that tier is going to be slower, boring, and more accurate.
My perception of recent news tends is that sources that were in the accurate/quality tier are shifting to the fast/anonymous tier. In the short term their reputation plus speed and sensationalism will make them seem like the best of both worlds. In the long run people will just recalibrate their opinions of previously esteemed sources.
There absolutely are different tiers of journalism - but that's about quality and reputation of publication.
The Washington Post and the New Yorker have higher editorial standards than Fox News.
There are important stories for which it simply isn't possible to get an expert to go on the record, for all kinds of reasons.
What's going on inside Twitter right now is a great example. Anyone who leaks details with their name attached to them will clearly get fired, or sued, or both.
That's why good journalists quote anonymous sources. If they could get a reputable source to go on record instead they would obviously do so!
This makes it extremely easy to make low quality content that looks just like high quality content, with the only difference being that it's more likely to be found out to be wrong information. And it doesn't seem like we can reliably punish news organizations for constantly putting out bad news, so what's their motivation to do the high quality version?
I have a friend who works in sales at a tech company and since all of this accounts are long term customers he really doesn't do much. They like the service so it is basically an auto-renewal. So I guess Elon thinks that advertisers will just auto renew because they like the ROI they get from their spend on twitter.
However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings.
> However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings.
Advertising spend doesn't work like pharmaceutical sales. They will renew precisely because they like the ROI, whether they get pampered or not, because as advertising channels, social media platform are additive. If it gives you positive ROI, you're strictly better off advertising on a network than not advertising on it, because the social networks themselves are mutually exclusive in terms of attention. That is, you can't access Twitter's eyeball-seconds any other way than through Twitter.
Not sure why this gets downvoted. IANAL but it every compliance training I've ever done, basing company business decisions on being invited to fancy dinners raises all sorts of red flag when it comes to compliance with anti corruption laws.
You don't base your decisions on fancy dinners, but you do get invited to fancy dinners! It's all part of the game and those who know how to play it play it well.
Yep. The GP is saying that advertisement spending is decided by corruption. On in other words, all the middlemen in those agencies that will "optimize" your spending are corrupt.
I see no reason to doubt it. But I would need some evidence before believing, and this thread has none (in any direction).
Usually salespeoples' pay is highly incentivized: I doubt the base salary of those salespeople is $300k. Those $300k people are probably bringing in millions of dollars of revenue apiece. Firing them will reduce operating expenses some, but drastically reduce income as well, unless they're replaced with something else.
Sales managers will just hand the accounts to new executives. It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore. They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them, not to do favors for their favorite executive.
> It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore.
They absolutely will. Media buyers for the gigantic companies expect to be wined and dined very aggressively. Early in my career I worked for an agency that had a couple truly massive EU companies as clients. You know these names. I saw first hand that the personal charisma and relationship of the agency owner was the only reason those execs kept coming back. And he went to very great lengths to stroke their egos.
With buyers that big, there's always another agency. So as soon as the buyer doesn't like something, buh bye.
I found the first part confusing to parse. It reads to me that 7000 is the 25% getting layoffs and made me think they had 28000 employees. They actually have ~7000 before layoffs.
$1 billion across 5000 employees is just $200,000 each. I suspect if you add total comp plus expenses for each employee you get to $200,000 pretty quickly.
Saw a note today they're going to layoff a number of "highly compensated" sales people highlighting that they made even more than very senior engineers... which is an interesting plan for a company trying to salvage revenue.
Anyone that has revenue has salespeople. Twitter’s (and every tech company’s) sales staff convince large companies to spend money paying for Twitter ads. A good salesperson will be mostly paid on commission for bringing huge clients who spend millions of dollars per year on advertising. Their comp is high specifically because they can sell many multiples of that comp.
A salesperson that has the ability to call the head of an advertising agency and get them to answer the phone is maybe the most valuable possible employee in any ad-supported business.
I'm being pedantic just for clarification but not everyone that has revenue has salespeople. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're implying a lot of companies you might think wouldn't have salespeople do in fact have them.
It might be arbitrary and pure speculation but with ~7500 employees (3000 of which are engineers) I think they'll be able to do just fine with 5000. -25% of staff would just mean going back to 2019 staff levels...
I remember it was a common meme on HN to ask what Twitter's thousands of employees did all day, even back in 2015. So maybe I'm falling into that trap. But I do still wonder.
for 2021, 1.2 billion was spent on R&D, 1.7 billion on cost of revenue (guessing a decent amount of this was salaries), and 765 million was due to a class action lawsuit they lost. With all of these, they showed a loss of 200 million. There definitely appears to be some fat that can be trimmed.
This year is on track for a gain, but they sold some ad service for a billion which distorts things.
Is the billion in debt payments actually confirmed? That would most likely require some increase in revenue which is probably why Musk is looking into the verified twitter payment thing.
I'm constantly shocked that "leveraged buyouts" are a thing. It seems like taking a business and loading it up with debt is a recipe for failure that would introduce a lot of risk for the lender, but banks and other capital holders continue issuing the debt.
Because they expect that debt to be inflated away as the currency its denominated in goes to zero (and they know they'll get replenished with cash when they need it via the Fed [1][2]).
They have a place and can be used effectively to solve actual problems. Old line businesses with too many units and complicated business arrangements can actually benefit from being torn apart and rebuilt effectively.
The problem is, when the Fed gives out exceptionally cheap interest, it makes it incredibly easy to apply this strategy even when the underlying business would not benefit from it.
I cannot fathom it either. First I heard that it was a thing was when the Glazers borrowed money to buy Manchester United then saddled them with half of the debt. They had no debt prior to being purchased. I don't know how common it is, but it feels like you're telegraphing that you're going to use the organization you bought as a piggy bank or a plaything. Like, see this shit (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glazer_ownership_of_Manchester...)
From 2016, the Glazers paid themselves annual dividends from the club, at over
£20 million every year from 2016 to 2020. In that same period, the club's debt
repayments "all but ceased", described The Daily Telegraph, while interest
payments continued. While paying dividends was common in business,
Manchester United were the sole Premier League club to "pay regular
dividends of any kind", reported The Daily Telegraph in May 2021
I don't even like Man Utd, but that's shady as hell
It's not intended for the business to continue operating after a leveraged buyout. Leveraged buyouts are typically used where the company has assets that aren't "productive" or is made up of more-or-less independent units that are worth more separate than together.
In these cases, cutting expenses by firing people is usually the first step, since the business' revenue stream can usually continue on autopilot for a while.
I expect Twitter to report record-breaking profits next quarter and Twitter's share price to go up accordingly. Maybe even enough to fill in some of Musk's hole.
I'm guessing you hear a lot more about the failures/impending failures in LBO financing than you do the successes/non-defaults. You could calculate the implied probability of default from the POV of the lender by comparing the financing terms to "assumed risk free" treasuries, and then compare that with the historical data to see how accurate they are at pricing that risk. If you'd rather not do that work, I'm sure there's plenty of papers in the academic literature examining that exact question.
> constantly shocked that "leveraged buyouts" are a thing
LBOs were a cure to the poison of the post-war conglomerate [1]. Those were run as personal fiefdoms by aloof executives and their cronies.
The traditional check was M&A. Conglomerates having no clean competitors, this–in practice–meant a buyer putting up cash and borrowing the rest, buying the company, taking out a loan in the company's name, using that to pay themselves and then paying back the personal loan. The only purpose the buyer's credit served was to gatekeep. LBOs compress that process, letting anyone challenge management if they can convince investors/lenders to back their vision.
Your number might be something other than cash flow. IIRC Twitter has net negative cash flow and about $4B in existing long term debt prior to the new debt financing of the acquisition.
The debt financing burden is a further burden on Musk: twitter generates no free cash flow. Musk has to pay the creditors, and his co-investors are not likely to put in more cash. Musk and every other investor bought-in to a deal that now would be valued at about half what they paid. Depending on how the debt is secured, this also means twice the percentage of the company's value is now encumbered by that debt. That means that if Twitter were sold today the equity investors could lose nearly their entire investment.
Even a lousy LBO would be of a company you can asset-strip to reduce the debt. What could Twitter sell? The financing really does not make sense.
- Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing.
- Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription
- Reports that he may lay people off (unverified)
- Carried in a sink.
None of these things are particularly unreasonable - Twitter owes something like 1 billion in debt payments this year and brings in close to $500 million, so layoffs were probably coming regardless.
I don't really see what the big deal with Musk buying Twitter is, except as cover for being mad about him unbanning people.
Yes, by historical Twitter standards it may seem unreasonable to write a Stripe API integration with simple UI and account history in six days. In the real world, however, a single developer can do it in less time than that.
Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.
It's possible that Musk is trying to set the reasonable expectation that a total comp package worth $400k should be exchanged for actual productivity, rather than playtime and busywork.
> In the real world, however, a single developer can do it in less time than that.
Which single developer can rollout payments globally in 6 days? How much time do they set aside to ensuring regulatory compliance with dozens of jurisdictions that have occasionally conflicting rules?
Ah yes, go ahead and create a stripe account that will allow $6m flow in less than a week, hit me up when you're done, that alone would probably require more than 6 days of back and forth with Stripe
I too thought I could rewrite twitter and instagram in 10 days with a few JS and PHP framework when I was fresh out of uni
> Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.
Tell me you've never been hired at Twitter without telling me you've never been hired at Twitter, lol. Every company has some dead weight, sure, but what you describe isn't remotely applicable to most people.
What? How would you feel if someone announced they were buying your company after breaking M&A laws and messing around with a significant portion of your net worth, tried to back out, further messing around with your net worth, started talking shit about your company, takes it over because they are forced to, then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.
> How would you feel if someone announced they were buying your company after breaking M&A laws and messing around with a significant portion of your net worth, tried to back out, further messing around with your net worth, started talking shit about your company, takes it over because they are forced to
As a salaried SE, why would you care? Or is that about SV's love for paying in stock instead of cash?
> then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.
That's an unconfirmed rumor at best, a lie most likely.
I'm not sure if my perspective is warped or yours is, but from my standpoint this is all pretty common in corporate America. Companies are acquired or merge and most everything changes - polices, training, perks, and almost always significant layoffs. Similar things usually happen to divisions and groups within a company as leadership changes. Has this really not been a thing at places like Twitter?
The difference is that usually it's not covered minute-by-minute on all the major news outlets.
No one would want to be in this situation yet it happens every day. Where I'm at, new VPs take over our division every couple years and every time they reorganize everything, rename everything, promote some people, lay off a bunch of people, bring in their "people", change polices and procedures, etc. It sucks but it's part of business as far as I can tell. If I walked out every time this happened I think I'd be hard pressed to keep a steady job.
Most of these people don't have to work for Twitter. They ended up working there because it used to be a nice company to work for.
New ownership seems to have changed that, not only in the things that were rumored they would do, but also in the abysmal communication during the whole thing.
This kind of thing happens all the time and it's always a risk, but that doesn't mean that people
have to like it.
> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription
> None of these things are particularly unreasonable
I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?
Reddit and Instagram is even worse. Besides cookie boxes (which all have different UIs and rarely a good no button) it's probably the most annoying thing on an ad-blocked internet.
How do the designers who work at these tech companies not understand that repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up? Nor incentivize others to link to it?
I think these things come about because of A/B testing. The metric being optimized is probably "app installs" or "account creations" and the negative side effects of driving a bunch of users off are not considered/measured.
I know how it happens, I've designed many a KPI. Something so fundamental and important as the default non-user first-exerpience (not just a 'signup flow') should be evaluated more holistically than just looking at numbers.
But I guess when you have layers of middle managers it's safer to point to a spreadsheet than make hard choices.
This is why I never touch new reddit or visit the site on mobile. It's old reddit + ublock origin on desktop and a third-party app on mobile every time.
Considering where their revenue comes from, have you considered that they may not want people who run ad-blockers to sign up?
They'll tolerate you if you produce content to help keep the paying users engaged, but plenty of businesses choose not to pursue customers who are unlikely to generate profit.
Agreed. I've noticed instagram and reddit over the last year have really tried to squeeze the last bit of growth it can by blocking non registered visitors from using the site past a couple of clicks. I get that it's their server resources I'm using up but for some reason the way they do it just aggravates me.
Non-technical non-users are not dissuaded, they sign up. Technical non-users using adblock aren't profitable conversions anyway, so "who cares?" is an entirely reasonable decision for the PO/PM who made it.
When a sign-in-to-see-the-thing-you-just-searched-for shows up, I take it as a sign that the company isn't doing very well. If you've ran out of good ideas for driving growth, you start considering the bad ideas.
Do you have numbers for the claim that this behavior doesn’t incentivize sign up? I’d guess that for most folks it indeed does — at some point you get annoyed enough to go through with the sign up process. These sites never log you out so it’s a one time thing. I personally am not inspired to sign up in these situations but I’d guess the numbers show that I’m in the minority.
Even fucking Google keeps putting a half-page pop-up on my iPhone saying "WANT TO SIGN IN, OR JUST KEEP SEARCHING 'ANONYMOUSLY' LIKE A CHUMP?" or something just as fucking annoying.
Yea, and the annoying part about Google is that you know that they know you're user X, just not logged in. They know I am logged in to several different accounts from this IP, they know I search for similar stuff under those accounts as I do when not logged in, etc. I feel like it would be more honest for Google to write something like, "Hey, ok_dad, we know it's you, just log in so we can save your porn searches to your account properly, rather than having to do data mining on your nasty habits."
> repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up?
It absolutely does, and that is precisely why they keep doing it. It doesn't work for the kinds of people that browse hackernews, but that's not their core audience anyway.
It's like saying ads don't work because you and me never click them because we use an adblock. Clearly they do work, and quite well...
I looked at Musk's feed and it did not appear, but just now clicked on one of the other Twitter links in this thread and got hit with it almost immediately. Maybe the change is still being rolled out? Maybe it was just a fluke? Maybe it doesn't appear on certain people's feeds for one reason or another?
Prolly not pushed to your local edge location, my version of twitter updated and it no longer shows the pop up screen yet it still shows the blue bar at the bottom of the page (which is fine imo)
>He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,
> Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first
Technical people, especially engineers and those on HN, hate sign up forms but having grown a product to X thousand users, the more you push the sign up form, the more people sign up. You can even plot a linear relationship between the two, which I've done before.
I noticed the same thing in the world of publishing (both print and online). It's the reasons pop-ups have never gone away -- they work. It's the reason those annoying inserts in print magazines that fall in your lap have never gone away -- they work.
This seems shortsighted. It's optimizing for what's easy to measure (sign ups) over what's hard to measure (brand, customer satisfaction, word of mouth).
Sign ups were directly correlated to revenue, at least in my case, and likely most others, such as in @joegahona's comment about publishing. That is to say, the customer satisfaction decrease in popups did not decrease revenue, and that is assuming there even was a satisfaction decrease at all; again, most technical users vastly overestimate how many people actually care about popups, most non-tech people simply click the X to make it go away, and a percentage of all visitors will sign up.
This may be true in the short term but eventually more of these decisions begin to accumulate and cause more dissatisfaction. Each one on its own has barely any impact on the bottom line, it's just one more cut among a hundred cuts. In the end you end up with a product that is overall annoying to use. And the whole time you could be going along, measuring each decision and thinking that you're doing okay and no mistakes are being made. But measuring today with yesterday is not the same as measuring today with 3 weeks ago + 13 decisions reversed, 5 decisions reversed, 1 decision reversed.
Agreed, just following data can be a dangerous path. You have to build things because they’re the right thing to build. You need a cohesive vision not scattershot A-B tests. Unless you only care about short term profit, of course.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That’s why the Facebooks die and the Apples and Googles last.
So what kind of experiment do you run to capture that dissatisfaction? Doesn’t have to be a/b. Just anything qualitative that doesn’t boil down to making decisions purely based on feelings.
Generally when running these kinds of tests you measure for further down the funnel metrics than sign ups. It's obvious sign ups would increase. In all the tests I've done around this, you look either at revenue or engagement over a longer term.
I think when you're really good at using a computer, you expect things to be easy. When you get a sign up form instead, it's extremely frustrating. We're used to it being easy to use a computer and can see that someone is making it hard for their own benefit. And then we think, if it's hard for us, it's even harder for someone without a lot of skills.
And I think that's probably true! But the person without much computer skills comes in with an expectation that stuff is gonna be hard. The egregious signup page isn't a surprise in that sense, it's just one of the many things they have to struggle with to use a computer.
An A/B then doesn't show any benefit for removing the signup page, only downside, because an A/B test only tests what happens if one feature changes. Our intuition can still be right; if we could do all the work to make it so a website is actually easy to use for someone without a lot of skills, like how Apple radically simplified the state of affairs with the iPod, that will positively defy peoples' expectations and make the app more accessible -- even if just simplifying any individual component doesn't do that.
Yeah this is unlikely to be positive on revenue and very well might be negative. It's extremely unlikely that Twitter put that registration wall in place without extensive testing and micro-optimization. Musk is just throwing his weight around and declaring himself smarter than everyone else.
it's gotten worse for me. i can't access it. in a browser that's always logged in, i try to visit any page on the site and get a page that says "Something went wrong, but don't fret — let's give it another shot."
the site works whenever i login via a fresh, private browser session. for a minute i thought i was blocked after muting the words "elon" and "musk"
I had that yesterday in Safari - clearing all the caches and closing every Twitter tab (I somehow had 5 open) meant that it worked when I opened a new one. Maybe something Service Worker-y? Have had that issue with the Twitter before.
It seems inconsistent now. Sometimes I can scroll for minutes with nothing and other times I get the sign-up pop up right away. Or was it always this way?
I’m sure they crunched the numbers and found that the gain from targeted ads toward the people that sign up is bigger than the loss of people who don’t use Twitter because of the annoyance. Instagram is even worse for what it’s worth.
At least in a dev situation I think 10-1 devs-to-managers is actually a pretty sizable ratio - I think ideally it's more of a 6-to-8ish to one.
Now, this of course assumes that engineering managers are not solely doing employee management but also are serving some "tech lead" type roles. I.e. even if an engineering manager isn't coding I think it's essential that (a) a considerable portion of their time is spent doing code reviews, (b) they should be working closely with product managers to define stories and requirements before the dev team starts implementing, etc.
That is, having line engineering managers solely do "people management" is universally a bad idea in my opinion. They should be getting their "hands dirty" in the tech aspects as well in order to be effective.
Yikes, I did read it wrong! OK, that would be insane, but I'm still curious if (a) that's not a pretty gross exaggeration or (b) if there some sort of job titling that's making the ratios look weird, e.g. "product manager" doesn't actually manage any people, or the way everyone who works in a bank is a "VP".
That’s not subjective. That is a manager. If someone reports to you and you are responsible for them, you’re their manager, regardless of job title. Subjective is if he’s counting program/product managers, account managers, etc.
Isn't this another version of Chesterton's fence - lots of people may seem like they serve no apparent role, until they are gone. This is not to say there aren't some that in fact do serve no role, but careful consideration is required to determine who is who imho.
Sometimes those people change the work processes in a way to make their role important.. Need printer paper? You have to go through the old lady in the 3rd floor office, because noone else can order, store or give out office supplies, not even the office next door, where you can get ethernet cables and headsets.
10 managers per coder seems a bit extreme. However, 3 managers, 7 "coders" engaging in social justice and one workhorse coder is entirely realistic.
I doubt though that Musk can figure out the actual workhorse in a short time. The posers are very good at self promotion.
Weeding out those who change pronouns in documentation and agitate on Slack would be a reliable start. From there, close reading of PRs, their usefulness and code quality is required. LOC is not an indicator.
> Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were "staff software engineer."
Do either of these guys even know how to program? Calacanis has been making tech content for decades, and I've never once heard him talk about writing code.
Because it's kind of odd for someone who makes such a big deal about high performing engineering orgs to hire his non-technical buddies into top tier engineering roles?
Why not hire them into "Chief of Staff" or "Chief of Fuck You Parag" roles?
Do you seriously think that these two advisors he brought in for a weekend are now their top engineers?
They both have plenty of experience running tech companies and are advising on structuring the team…
I know everyone’s trying to jump on the hate bandwagon but this is a stretch.
Well, no, because if I thought that was the case then it wouldn't be silly that they have a top engineering title. I'm saying that it is silly. I agree this is a bottom-of-the-list issue, but it does strike me as weird even for Elon.
I don't work at Twitter, so I don't really care what they call themselves. That being said, at every company I've ever worked at the people who have responsibilities like "running tech companies and [...] advising on strutting the team" usually have manager, director, or VP titles. It is a little odd to give a staff software engineer title to someone who isn't able to write code.
Like I said though, I have no horse in this race, so whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know how much anyone can trust anything coming out of Elon's twitter feed, tbh. He tried to squirm out of this deal with some pretty spurious claims. Now he's using the same spurious claim tactic to continue to try and squirm out of his failure to manage his bad acquisition.
>However he tweeted that there are 10 people managing for every one dev
What would the figure usually be.
You have marketing managers, people managing account maintenance, people managing bot reports, etc etc.
It seems to me, that's almost like complaining that an office or shop has 10 times more managers than maintenance guys. Both are locations where business are carried out rather than the actual business itself.
Valuations would be down 70% (eg $META, $SNAP) if it weren’t for this buyout so I think the majority of employees end up better than they would have been. Annual grants are usually 10-25%.
2. As another commenter mentioned, I don't even think this would be possible given California WARN Act requirements, but I'm less sure on the legal requirements here.
Of course not, I would expect him to say nothing in that case.
Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous how people conflate "Elon is a bad guy who stretches the truth all the time" with him sending out a completely unambiguous statement that, if it were a lie, would easily be proven wrong in one day. Point being, people who do stretch the truth/over-promise know how to do it in a way that isn't falsifiable in 24 hours.
Again, the outright lies he tweeted were not something that were provably false in less than 24 hours.
Just consider his infamous "Funding secured" tweet. I considered that a lie, but there is obviously enough wiggle room/deniability over what "secured" actually means. That's not the case here.
In any case, the deadline has already passed. If there were to have been mass layoffs before the Nov 1 deadline, it's too late.
I mean, he did send out that classic "funding secured" unambiguous statement right? Which was insane and people doubted immediately. He had to settle with the SEC barely a month afterwards.
quick question here. I'm completely in the dark about US labour law and such but is it possible to lay people off if the sole purpose is to prevent them from receiving stock compensation? Sounds kind of wild given that it seems expected compensation when you signed a contract to work there in the first place.
I don't know about the law, but it makes a lot of sense of to me. Compensation that's "in your pocket" is compensation you have. RSUs were _always_ a way to keep you around for a payout later (and potentially rescind the payout if they don't want you around). Viewing them as money in your pocket is a mistake.
> Sounds kind of wild given that it seems expected compensation when you signed a contract to work there in the first place.
Contract says you get the stock if you work for a certain period of time at the company. Consequently, if you're fired or quit before that period elapses, you don't get it.
There are laws that restrict firing someone to avoid a payout, at least in some states.
Not sure if it applies to stock vesting. From what I understand, the main goal is to prevent an employer from firing someone at e.g. 19 years 11 months tenure purely to avoid paying them a pension.
1. It's not like this should come as a surprise to anyone at Twitter. If you work at Twitter and haven't been updating your resume and reaching out to other contacts, don't know what to say.
2. Remains to be seen what severance package laid off employees get, but with the California WARN requirements I think it's likely to be at least a couple months, which is fair. Looks like Musk tried to screw over some of the top execs by firing "for cause" (and note, in an exec's contract "for cause" can't just be "we don't like the job you did", it pretty much always has specific stipulations about breaking laws or company policy, e.g. sexual harassment), but they have more than enough resources to sue if necessary.
3. Is there anyone who reasonably thinks that Twitter has a lot of unproductive employees that should be let go? I think unions can do a lot of good, but not if it's the standard "once you're in the union it's nearly impossible to let you go" situation. Highly productive employees hate working with people who just "phone it in".
The Washington Post really has lost a lot of credibility since the Bezos purchase in 2013. It reflects a trend of consolidation of corporate media in the hands of America's ruling oligarchs (who exert far more influence over federal policies and expenditures than any Congressperson, and perhaps the President as well).
For example, I can't imagine the WaPo taking this same tone with regard to a Bezos acquisition or contract, or publishing confidential leaked details of inside business discussion, as it would almost certainly upset their owner and lead to 'a change in leadership' at the Post. The same is true of their coverage of the unionization effort at Amazon warehouses and distribution centers. Similarly, the CIA and NSA deals that AWS has engaged in aren't getting this level of scrutiny from the Post either, and there's little chance of the Post ever printing anything [like the 2010] "Top Secret America" series on how defense contracts are doled out to intelligence contractors.
That's why we have multiple newspapers. The other ones can cover for deficiencies of a single one. The Post is doing great investigative journalism still, including this piece.
I understand the argument, but I find this a bit disturbing, as there are some topics that all of the oligarch-owned newspapers will not be willing to cover in depth. There is kind of a 'fringe' that will publish some details, i.e.
"(2020) Amazon: We Totally Don’t Want To Spy On You. Also Amazon: We Just Hired The Architect Of The NSA’s Mass Domestic Surveillance Program"
However, most people view that outlet as a highly partisan right-wing opinion-centric source (with rather limited sources), not at all the 'traditional unbiased news media' - which instead avoid the story, and instead just churn out a stream of pro-government, pro-corporate propaganda 24/7. This is pretty unhealthy IMO, since, ahem, 'democracy dies in darkness', and is the kind of behavior you see from Chinese and Russian state media, not from independent journalism.
Sounds like you need to start a newspaper and give unbiased news to the people and become super successful doing so! In the end there will always be a market for actual journalism and a market for sensational clickbait and a market for something in between. In my opinion outfits like the NYT, WP, Economist, WSJ etc are all super flawed but in combination are doing a pretty good job keeping government accountable.
I think it would behoove you, given how easily they bent over for Bezos and have silenced opposition against him, to reflect back on the last two decades and compare various outlets (including the ones you don’t like because they don’t align with your political stance) and see just for how long they’ve been corrupted.
They didn’t wake up in 2013 and suddenly decide they won’t have any integrity.
It's not that they don't align with my political stance, it's that they don't do their job of providing broad-spectrum information on the actions of governments and corporations. To emphasize, Top Secret America was an outstanding expose of the military-intelligence contracting system, but that was before Bezos got his ~600 million CIA web services contract, and soon after that he spent what, ~$250 million to buy the Post, after which that kind of investigative journalism was eliminated.
However, your point is pretty valid - back in 2002, the WaPo regurgitated US government talking points on (non-existent) Iraq WMDs without bothering to do any investigative pushback.
They literally have a section of the website dedicated to investigative journalism, including a number of recent investigations into government contractors, military officials, government corruption (all of these in October 2022!). Going back more over the past 6 months, you have investigations into police brutality, election integrity units, more coverage of government contractors and corruption, police corruption, and lawmaker self-dealing.
I see them reporting on stories that others have generated, but what I certainly don't see is anything like investigative journalism targeting any of Bezo's business interests, i.e. generating original stories, publishing embarrassing leaks (that others have not already published) etc. Again, see the Top Secret America investigative journalism effort from 2010. There's nothing similar that the Post has done since Bezos bought it, is there?
Maybe for the simple fact that they are still predominantly a local newspaper for Washington DC. Their beat coverage is still largely going to be Federal US politics.
> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next
Part of me hopes he does, because that's the only way the Tall Poppy Syndrome folks have any chance of learning. But most of me has more empathy than they do.
The Tall Poppy Syndrome folks are not those at Twitter. I know a few, and respect them, and have no problem with them making more than most (as I did myself when I worked at FB). No, the TPS folks are those right here bashing Twitter employees, as you yourself complained about. I don't know who they are, but I do know how they act because they're acting out right here in front of us.
> The ONLY bad guys in this scenario are Musk and his yes-men
So you no longer have a problem with the haters? What changed in the last two hours?
The video was posted by a remote financial analyst who was visiting the SF office for the first time. She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time. The perks are nice, maybe too nice you could argue, but the notion that the video proves she (and other Twitter workers) don't do any "real work" is idiotic. It's a short video, a tiny sample of her work day -- why would she dedicate any portion of it to showing her crunching numbers in Excel or whatever?
This is not the first time a twitter employee has implied a light work schedule. There were posts when the first Elon buyout rumor came around about twitter employee reporting remote work amounting to around 30 hours a week..
This just adds fuel to the fire that for the most part Twitter has a bunch of part time employee getting very high full time wages.
Now there is a large segment of the population that believe 32 hour work weeks should be standard, if your one of those then I suppose their posts will not spark much respond, but for most people that will spark strong negative emotions.
> She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time.
then it should not be labeled as "a day in the life"
Watching the video the person comes away with an impression this is more than just 1 hour of the day. I also suspect you are giving this person far too much credit for the amount of work they did that day. I am guessing it was more like 1 hour of real work, couple hours of meetings, and the rest socializing / using the "amenities"
Ouch, that's a pretty horrific video. I don't know if that kind of thing goes down well in the "influencer" or the SV tech scenes, but outside those bubbles it's clearly going to come across as narcissistic, entitled, and lazy. Which is unfortunate because I'm sure she's a wonderful person and a hard and competent worker, but there's a serious lack of judgement making that public.
She is shown scheduling a 30 minute meeting which seems to be the only work done before getting ready for lunch. After lunch plays foosball and meditation and exploring. Now that might be entirely reasonable if she comes to work at 11am and leaves in the evening or clocks back on to do some work at night, or did a bunch of other work before lunch. And having a lot of meetings is what happens when you're a remote worker who comes into the office once a year. None of that comes across to in the video though so what it actually looks like is about 3 hours of meetings (which are mostly taking pictures of one another), and the rest of it lounging around eating and drinking and unwinding.
it's not apples to apples but the other energy firms did the same to Enron employees when they were walking out with their boxes of stuff. iirc HR departments in competing firms put out gleeful notices that former Enron employees would not be considered for open positions. Everyone loves to point and laugh when someone a tick up on the perceived totem pole falls down a few notches.
Can't blame them honestly. There was that Project Veritas video where they talked to some employees and they don't even hide how big of assholes they are.
1. Twitter, the core application, is literally a weekend junior dev project. The only engineers on the payroll who provide actual value, out of THOUSANDS, are those who scale the application and infrastructure. The vast majority of these people have been paid huge comp packages for doing effectively nothing. Sure, there are auxilliary applications like the ad platform, business intelligence, etc, but there is no world in which you need the enormous engineering staff they have to build or run these. Most of these people are useless.
2. Twitter employees have been complicit in curbing free speech, in a highly partisan manner, for years now.
> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next
I suspect that if you provide actual, tangible value and you're not actively silencing people for using the wrong pronouns, you'll be safe.
How is broadly laying off 25% of the org ever going to have the precision of pointed firings for excessive pronoun use? Even real-value is hard to measure at that scale.
Not sure what Musk's intentions are with this. Normally this will lead to the best people updating their resumes and switching over to less toxic places ASAP. You are left with people who are attached to their ancient code or who can't find good jobs elsewhere.
The alternative is to take a measured approach to learning about the business and org, in order to make informed decisions about how to restructure efficiently. But of course that takes time and effort. For somebody impetuous and self-indulgent, it's much more satisfying to go in swinging a machete on day one.
So is you issue not that he's laying off all these people, but just the speed that he's doing this? Or to put it another way, let's say that he took a year and really studied Twitter and then came to the same conclusion and did the same layoffs, would you have an issue with it then?
If Elon or anyone else actually has strong reason to believe that certain employees are dead weight I'm fine with them being laid off. Given the speed and general dysfunction of this particular case there's basically no chance that's what is going on here.
Exactly. If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore. Even if you fire them, that's a surefire way of making sure that the best 5% of people leave the company anyways do to the depressing atmosphere this creates.
> If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore.
This would assume that the previous management had an incentive to cut costs and remove 50% of their workforce... which is probably not the case at all.
What makes you think that previous management needlessly employed unproductive workers when they could have easily not done so? Do you think that Elon Musk has some special magic insight that makes him get the same amount of work done with half the resources? I know some people at Twitter and some people at Musk's companies and I don't think they are fundamentally run differently.
My experience is that most companies are pretty averse to firing people in general, even in the US with at-will employment, and even when there are many people who are moderately incompetent (so long as they are not posing obvious risks to the company, e.g. sexual harassment, etc.).
>What makes you think that previous management needlessly employed unproductive workers when they could have easily not done so?
They probably don't know who the unproductive ones are anymore because without a fresh look at things they can't think about it objectively. They give tasks to people and they get done at the same speed as they've always been done with. How do you suddenly decide: Hey actually guys, I know we were working like this for 6 years but actually, we should be 40% faster on every single task so... you know.. start working faster please and everyone who doesn't gets fired.
It's just not realistic for existing managers to do this for so many reasons. Unless absolutely forced by financial realities which was apparently never the case for Twitter.
As you might have noticed, it is quite painful to fire people, and if you have a public profile (as most CEOs of large corps usually do), you get a reputation hit for being ruthless and all that stuff.
Previous management at Twitter didn't own a significant percentage of the company shares. Why be the "bad guy" when the paychecks are still rolling in? But when it's your "own money" at stake, you get much more motivated to cut unnecessary costs. Even if that makes lots of people on the Internet hate you.
I'm absolutely not saying anything related to Musk, at all?
Your original comment stated: "If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore."
Therefore you, not I, implied that there are relatively unproductive workers at Twitter (not unreasonable, of course - there's always going to be a performance spectrum) - and you suggested that the previous management would have removed them if there was an easy way to identify them.
This is what I was disagreeing with - your premise that the previous management would have removed their most unproductive 50% if there was an easy way to identify them.
Says who? The Twitter board of directors didn't own a lot of shares to begin with. The C-suite (as we now know) had a golden parachute which means he's going to get paid millions as long as he kept the status quo.
> Normally this will lead to the best people updating their resumes and switching over to less toxic places ASAP
Potentially, but not necessarily. Some high performers may reasonably think "finally someone who is going to cut through all the bullshit in this bloated company and demand some accountability". Look through some of the stories when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple; it wasn't that dissimilar.
Now, that said, folks like this usually want and demand an inspiring leader. Some may think Musk fits the bill for that (I think I probably would have years ago), but these days I usually just want him to STFU with so much of the bullshit nonsense he sends out. I mean, the day after he closed the Twitter deal he tweeted a blatantly ridiculous and libelous story about Paul Pelosi - it's just more of the same stupid shit from him.
I think in general because companies find it very difficult to actually be able to tell who is lazy vs. effective. This is especially true if you want to do it at scale and quickly.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadSo, don't accept anything that doesn't preserve your rights to your Tuesday equity grant.
Details here: https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN
Key Provision: "Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. ...."
Penalties for Violation: "A possible civil penalty of $500 a day for each day of violation. Employees may receive back pay to be paid at employee’s final rate or 3 year average rate of compensation, whichever is higher."
Whether you're guilty of murder or not is of course established after the fact. And you can do nothing wrong in the act of killing someone and still get screwed by a jury. Just ask the political left what they think of Kyle Rittenhouse being innocent.
You can certainly follow the law and go to jail regardless.
"Employers who fail to provide notification must provide their laid-off employees with back pay and benefits for the period of the violation (which means the amount of time by which their advance notice fell short of 60 days)."
The value of ripping off the Band-Aid could easily be worth two months of severance in his mind.
My understanding is that this was a take private so all stock was acquired already (ie vested options get paid and unvested get terminated at Close).
This is exactly what would happen if you acquired our company. It’s not like a purchaser would have the honor long term vesting schedules. They bought everything already that was available to be sold. Those who didn’t vest were dragged along into the deal.
That is a terrible deal. I've worked at a company where all outstanding RSUs would vest immediately at the time of purchase; was that an unusual arrangement?
I don’t see any reason to suspect they’re going to somehow violate the law and cost themselves additional fines if or when they do it. This is just about speculation about what Musk will eventually do.
Termination on the basis of poor performance (legally, "incompetence") requires supporting documentation, such as written reviews of the employees' performance prior to the termination. And legally incompetence only tests the employee's performance at tasks actually within their job description; an employee can't be fired for incompetence at other tasks. Very importantly, a new boss coming in and deciding that employees weren't performing up to his arbitrary (and new) standards doesn't pass muster.
A mass layoff for "performance" reasons has never been sustained by a labor department. The penalty is $500 for each day of violation (meaning each day short of the 60 required by the Warn ACT), plus all salary and bonuses that would have been paid during the 60 day period, plus legal fees incurred by the employees to protect their rights.
Additionally, a "for cause" termination on performance (or any other grounds) opens the employer up to per se libel lawsuits. Literally, all the employee has to do is submit a copy of the termination letter into evidence and they win unless Twitterlon can demonstrate that the employee was actually incompetent.
I beat even Elon, at this moment, does not have a full accounting of what the layoffs will be. This is all just pure media hype and nonsense with very little basis in truth or reality
> The company has yet to release a formal announcement of the acquisition. The communications department has gone silent. Rumors have swirled about layoffs, with some notices going out quietly.
Is it just me or is this headline totally misleading?
No formal announcement yet folks.
"Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts"
I opened the article thinking this was a formal announcement. But it's nothing of the sort. It's just speculation at this stage.
Hope that clears things up.
> ...according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved.
E.g. according to Business Insider Facebook should have fired half the company, according to “sources”, but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge yet
Either put a name to it, or dont report on it
Quote Orwell, Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. You need to get people to tell you about all those things, and as that someone who dislike them being printed has power (it ain't news otherwise,) you need to find a way to make people talk to you. "Help me to rekt your career and life" just don't cut it.
The "media" did this to themselves, now at this point no one would trust any news story that is only validated with "anonymous sources" as the media has proven they are either incapable of vetting these sources for truthful info, or do not actually have any sources at all and are just making shit up for the clicks
Either way they have given the public no reason to trust them at this point
Seems Elon is keeping his machinations to himself.
Currently the target is Nov 8, but a lot could happen before then.
The entire waiving of due diligence thing is also such a weird talking point. There was no contingency on due diligence, but part of the deal did include access to the information he would need to do it and any incorrect information in public filings should have been enough to get out of the deal.
Tweeting it out, well. I could resist that urge just fine.
This is how you get a press that only uncritically regurgitates press releases.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387722
How is it legal to (even threaten) firing if a new assigned task that takes a long time is not done on time?
In general employers are able to benefit from this symmetrical relationship more often though since they are only losing a small percentage of their workers while the employee is losing 100% of the income they were getting from that employeer.
GP was clearly talking about the assymetry of consequences, not the action itself. You intentionally misinterpreted them.
In general, I'd say at-will still favors employers, who are in a better position to structurally mitigate the threat of a critical employee leaving, even though they often don't do so.
A business can and must hedge against critical employees leaving. It's much harder as an employee to hedge against your employer giving you the boot.
There ARE "insurance" products that will "defer your credit/mortgage payments in case of a job loss" - they are almost all universally some form of scam (or at least a very bad "insurance").
But the bigger point is that unemployment insurance is very little money compared to a good professional salary.
I suppose the ultimate protection a person has is savings, and it's likely more cost-effective than any form of insurance - except it's hard in practice for most people, partly because they barely have any disposable income, and partly because it requires the degree of self-control many (if not most) don't have (and the overall culture isn't encouraging it).
You can debate whether it's enough or fair or whatever, but insurance against unemployment does exist for employees.
In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.
It is not the same if the company fires its janitors, but I don't think I will stay in a literally filthy company that fires its janitors.
> In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.
I have a friend who several years ago who was laid off with 3 months severance. They left feeling cheerful, telling people that if they couldn't find a job in 3 months, they deserved to be fired. Fortunately it only took slightly longer than 3 months and it's something we can laugh about now. The whole "it'll be easy to find a job with this skill-set" is true right up until it's not and is a risky backup plan.
Employers do not experience this same effect. Even if lots of people get laid off from a company without notice, there will almost always be people who are willing to take new jobs there.
Not really. I have not once been asked for references from previous companies.
You might make an assumption from the last item, but without specific details and by the time you might be confirming employment the ineligibility for rehire likely will not disqualify the candidate…especially if other former employers have you tagged as eligible.
If I quit without notice, high revenue systems could fail or not launch.
I kind of like software because of this. An individual has great value. Of course, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that fires people Willy nilly.
But for software at-will can definitely be asymmetric benefiting the employee. Software developers aren’t replaceable cogs.
In the US.
I'm glad I work in a country where workers actually have rights.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
Fascinating.
Of course, this comment is predicated on the assumption that America's loose labour laws are the reason for this salary disparity, and I'm not personally willing to follow you to that conclusion.
I think it's far more likely that American software engineers get paid more because the industry was effectively born there, and it was born there due to historical accidents like the US being where the transistor was invented, the advancement of technology due to government spending during World War II and the subsequent space race, etc, not to mention the US being the center of the VC world, which has its own deep history.
In other words, America has A but not B, Europe has B but not A, and there doesn't happen to be a place with both A and B, but it's not impossible in principle. Workers would still need to decide if they value A or B more, even if in a perfect world they could have both.
If it's the latter, absolutely you are right, and it is certainly the case that tech employees today are forced to make the choice between New York/California tech salaries and strong labour laws, regardless of whether or not there's a necessary inverse relationship between those two things.
If you can fire low performers, average performance will be higher, which means average pay will be higher. The risk is that you personally get mistaken for (...or correctly assessed as...) a low performer. Hence, tradeoffs.
There are states in the US where teacher's unions are out-lawed. US workers don't have rights. I have a feeling you might feel differently if not part of the segment of the working class that happens to be seeing benefits atm.
That’s a bold statement. Care to back it up?
> Collective Bargaining: The law limits collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases cannot exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Increases from the bargaining process for teachers are applied only to the base wages, and do not include the additional salary of teachers. Contracts are limited to one year and wages frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units must take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers cannot collect union dues, and members of collective bargaining units are not required to pay them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions...
Yes, in the EU I get paid a lot less, but the cost of living in Europe is also not nearly as expensive (although we also do pay more taxes). That's not even accounting for job security or workers rights, I seem to just have more money left over each month on average than any Americans I know of in the same industry because the cost of living is just lower and I have less heavy unexpected expenses (healthcare being the big one of course, but when I hear what US SWEs need to pay just to stay housed and fed, it makes absolutely no sense in prices compared to the EU).
That's not a case of risk aversion, its a case of relative vs absolute pay. In relative pay, the EU pays their employees just straight up better. The US is only better in absolute pay, but that gets drained quickly due to the local economy scaling up to match.
All of these relationships are two way. If they make a demand to change the expectations of working hours and work time, you say no, I won't do that. They can fire you if they don't like the relationship, but even in the US you're likely to win at least unemployment benefits.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/electronic-arts-faces-overt...
There are legal, labor, consequences for cultures that expect more than 40 hours on average.
You can fire an employee for no reason at all since employment is "at will". Musk probably assumes a good deal of the workforce is lazy and/or incompetent and he doesn't want to pay them. So he's figuring out who to fire.
It’s very common for companies to let individuals go before bonuses vest.
Usually your contracts doesn't specify time worked per week, only that you finish your work.
I think this is a reality check and a power play by Musk to remind employees of the fact.
I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal outside the rare edge case where there is only a single employer in a geographical region, and even that unfortunate situation should probably be remediated with a different type of government intervention.
Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?
No.
Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads.
At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.
For certain types of jobs it's still the most effective method out there.
Not saying it's worth doing, or a good job, but they're out there, especially in the smaller towns.
There is a big one: the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship, the employer clearly has more power over where things go. So it's absolutely normal to protect the employee from being asked too much, especially when said employee doesn't benefit from the overtime.
There is a big bias towards taking companies as important citizens whose needs must be catered for, but it's taking more and more importance when the actual citizens aren't listened to. It is important to put companies back to what they are: a social construct for exploiting people and make profit from their work.
Sure it is, they want my labor, I want to sell my labor. We agree on a price.
If my price changes, or they are unwilling to buy it any more I find a new person to buy my labor.
I was looking for a job when I found this one, and I will be looking again when I find my next one.
Don't frame not wanting to take abuse as being entitled.
Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.
I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.
"Workers" is strange to me when talking about people who make 5-10x the national average (i.e. make more than many average executives in other industries). They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion. I'm fine with including staff in retail, restaurants etc, but someone making $500k+ a year doesn't fit into that category.
You are (understandably) conflating "worker" with "working class", but these are different contexts. A worker is anyone who must, well, work for a living as opposed to their income coming from property/capital.
Tying it to the salary makes sense to me. If you get paid minimum wage, asking you to work overtime without additional pay is unjust. You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
Yes, I am a well-paid SWE. But I must still work for my salary; my income does not come from owning capital. That's the crucial difference.
Something on fire? Sure. Regulation means this project must be done Monday? Maybe, thought I'm wondering why management didn't start it sooner. A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
New CEO sets an arbitrary deadline for no reason other than to cull the heard? Fuck that.
I imagine that at this point, many are staying until they get fired so they can collect severance pay.
That is what I would do. I absolutely would not work for Elon’s Twitter long term unless they paid me a king’s ransom, but I would definitely stick around and jump through the hoops just long enough to get a nice payout.
You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!"
Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explosive considering large chunks of the millennial generation were already coddled—and yes, I'm a millennial). You get a bunch of entitled brats who view anyone who isn't doing what they're doing as _less than_ (which is ironic considering those "less-thans" keep the bubble they live in running—electricity, food delivery, sewage systems, etc).
Pepper in the absolutely psychotic, cult-level diatribe these people sputter about "changing the world" and "making dents" and you have a low-level Jim Jones field jamboree brewing. It's absolutely zero surprise what's come out of SV over the last decade and change.
And that doesn't even factor in the pharmaceuticals!
Oh Lordy…I had a boss send me to a “management seminar that he found exceptional” that turned out to be that train wreck around 20 years ago. I think I lasted maybe an hour before I got up and left in the middle of the session with the speaker yelling at me to sit down (and some rude asshole trying to block me from leaving…unsuccessfully).
I called my boss and told him I left, that I didn’t care if he got a refund, and to fire me if he wanted (he didn’t).
Both behaviors are ignorant and exist in an altered state of reality that's long-term destructive.
The idea that an employee doesn't think think they need to work overtime even though the company has just changed ownership, because they think they know better than the company owner what needs to be done, view his requests as "whims", and believe that because the owner had comments and opinions about the company that singled out no engineer or manager by name that they therefore should be allowed to disregard this direction, is one of the most entitled things I've ever heard. Doubly so if they were one of the ones who had spent the past few years personally shitting all over Musk publicly.
Of course Santa Barbara is nicer, but the bay is nicer than most of the world. Maybe 75%.
it's the epitome of Twitter, overflowing with righteous indignation online but won't get off their ass to do anything IRL.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
I have a hard time believing there was not complicity between the 3 key execs, and Yoel Roth, according to that image.
Unless I’m missing something, the only sources for this article are a mix of speculation and anonymous sources who can’t even agree with each other about the layoff.
How did people communicate before the invention of Twitter and employer provided email and slack channels?
This is basically what news is. The media "exploits" (reports on) current events, gets traffic and then pays its employees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/search/?query=twitter+elon&fa...
Did a quick search of Elon + Twitter. Everything they reported seems factual and tied to things that actually happened? If Twitter does lay off a large amount of people will you admit that Washington Post probably had good sources or continue to be continually skeptical?
I think part of wanting a good media atmosphere is rewarding news sources that are shown to be reliable - and I would argue Washington Post is close to that.
They have a bunch of rumors, and panicked employees as "sources" none of which are likely in a position to know anything with any degree of certainty and it is widely irresponsible to report on it as if it was factual
WaPo isn't the best of new reporting agencies [0], but it's certainly not the worst. They do have standards and they don't make up the large majority of their data. Meaning, they have actually talked to someone that is 'familiar' with the 'deal' at some point 'last week.' It's not pure speculation on WaPo's part, though it maybe pure-unrefined-grade-A speculation on the contact's part.
If I had to bet, and many HNers out there are currently in that seat, then I'd bet on their reporting over other forms of pure speculation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post#Criticism_...
News agencies are organizations made of humans that have flaws and we should always treat with a critical eye. But we shouldn't just dismiss one out of hand as not one of the best because of the existence of a "Criticism and controversies" section on Wikipedia especially when it is FAR tamer than many mainstream competitors.
They were told that these were performance based terminations, despite not receiving any negative evaluations during their time at Twitter. They were also told they needed to sign NDAs in order to receive any severance.
Can't confirm the %.
Tweeps are being told these are performance-related terminations, not layoffs. It was posited that "performance" was referring to Twitter, not the employee. I simply pointed out that's exactly what a layoff was, and performance in this context can only mean the employee, not the company.
In most cases, an employer will want at least something in return for providing severance pay.
But NDA is another reason, or even keeping unemployment insurance premiums low by having everyone that accepts severance state that they are voluntarily leaving the company in exchange for the severance.
By voluntarily separating, they cannot collect unemployment benefits from the state, which means the state charged the employer less in unemployment insurance premiums.
But I suspect it’s mainly as a carrot to sign the NDA/non-compete/whatever else they want you to sign to keep not talk about what happened.
These kinds of things are not always about the strict minimum cost actions. In general, it is a better world with some degree of human consideration being part of things.
I am quite sure many of the cases I had involvement in could have been done cheaper. However, I am also quite sure the people involved had what they need to get through to their next gig with few worries too.
That is worth a lot and these days one can never know who may be working for or with who.
I hope you start a company and are in a position to give severance to fired employees and not make them sign non-competes.
If the employee doesn’t like the terms, they’ll just get the statutory minimum.
It’s pretty rare anyone takes that option though!
Lots of coasters in big companies can get with good rating just be being on the good side of manager/peers and even get Bonus points if you are vocal about DEI and activism.
No, this is pissing on people and claiming it's raining.
There are people who build multiple successful companies and then there are who prioritize well-being and pick some weird hill to die on.
He's a really good marketer, a good businessman but I do not think he knows what he is doing when he requests access to the codebase behind a massively distributed and scalable system such as Twitters backend
People like Walter Isaacson have a better opinion about him
It's probably worth it to find a labor attorney.
- four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity
- numerous employees contacted by The Post, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
- tweets from some of the people involved
- photos obtained by The Washington Post
- A document filed with financial regulators Monday
- interviews and documents obtained by The Post
- court records
Numerous employees - how much insight does a web developer at Twitter have into the inner workings of the management shift happening right now?
Photos of what? The conference room? Are we going to pull in a body language expert to analyze what Elon was saying by walking into the room with sneakers instead of dress shoes?
There is no accountability for sources in journalism, and it's why I think it's 99% useless garbage and never read it. Journalists and publications find the sources they want to tell the story they already planned to write regardless of reality.
There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet).
When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters", you need to translate it to something more like the following:
The journalist who wrote this has found a credible source, who has insider knowledge.
That source has requested anonymity, and the journalist finds that request credible.
The journalist then used their skills and experience in writing about this area over the course of their career to evaluate if that source was trustworthy. They also considered if the source had their own motivations which could affect what information they chose to share and why.
The journalist may have then cross-checked that information against other sources of information to help evaluate its credibility. This becomes more important the more high stakes the claim in question becomes.
An editor (and potentially even separate fact checkers) evaluated the statement as well, and applied judgement as to whether it held up firmly enough to be published.
There are so many phrases like this in top-tier journalism. When an experienced journalist reads an article from someone else that says "a senior official in the administration said..." they can often narrow that down to just a dozen or so potential people, based on their knowledge of that beat.
As a non-journalist reading newspapers this is pretty infuriating, because there's this whole language that you need to know about in order to fully understand what's being communicated here.
Edit: forgot to mention the deli!
Click bait headlines, stories with weak fact checking or even printing outright lies has decreased (at least my) trust in news articles and has resulted in me questioning facts and anonymous quotes more frequently(which may be a good thing).
Examples are the New York Times writing a hit piece against Tesla, where it turned out they had driven the car in circles in a parking lot for hours to get the battery to run out, but didn't think that Tesla might be able to get data on what they did. Turns out the author of the article works for the oil industry. The NYT also regularly publishes as fact things told to them by the Pentagon and three letter agencies, rather than calling the information alleged.
My perception of recent news tends is that sources that were in the accurate/quality tier are shifting to the fast/anonymous tier. In the short term their reputation plus speed and sensationalism will make them seem like the best of both worlds. In the long run people will just recalibrate their opinions of previously esteemed sources.
The Washington Post and the New Yorker have higher editorial standards than Fox News.
There are important stories for which it simply isn't possible to get an expert to go on the record, for all kinds of reasons.
What's going on inside Twitter right now is a great example. Anyone who leaks details with their name attached to them will clearly get fired, or sued, or both.
That's why good journalists quote anonymous sources. If they could get a reputable source to go on record instead they would obviously do so!
> After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000
that should reduce operating expenses significantly, several hundreds of millions dollars?
Advertising spend doesn't work like pharmaceutical sales. They will renew precisely because they like the ROI, whether they get pampered or not, because as advertising channels, social media platform are additive. If it gives you positive ROI, you're strictly better off advertising on a network than not advertising on it, because the social networks themselves are mutually exclusive in terms of attention. That is, you can't access Twitter's eyeball-seconds any other way than through Twitter.
I see no reason to doubt it. But I would need some evidence before believing, and this thread has none (in any direction).
I mean, not all of the business -- but businesses can and will sever contracts because they lose their favorite point-of-contact.
> They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them
What if those benefits are already pretty slim, and they've been thinking of dropping Twitter entirely, but for the efforts of their Twitter AE?
I don't understand this mindset that all salespeople are fungible drones.
They absolutely will. Media buyers for the gigantic companies expect to be wined and dined very aggressively. Early in my career I worked for an agency that had a couple truly massive EU companies as clients. You know these names. I saw first hand that the personal charisma and relationship of the agency owner was the only reason those execs kept coming back. And he went to very great lengths to stroke their egos.
With buyers that big, there's always another agency. So as soon as the buyer doesn't like something, buh bye.
Boom 0 cost, infinite money hack
Tomorrow's news: "HN business man solved the recession"
Edit: per Wapo but you can see the cost structure from 10ks mostly
Cash flow last year $630 million.
I think 25% staff reductions is just a starting point.
A salesperson that has the ability to call the head of an advertising agency and get them to answer the phone is maybe the most valuable possible employee in any ad-supported business.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
I remember it was a common meme on HN to ask what Twitter's thousands of employees did all day, even back in 2015. So maybe I'm falling into that trap. But I do still wonder.
They only have made a profit 2 out of the last 10 years.
This year is on track for a gain, but they sold some ad service for a billion which distorts things.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/unde...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1xgQeCiu6k
The problem is, when the Fed gives out exceptionally cheap interest, it makes it incredibly easy to apply this strategy even when the underlying business would not benefit from it.
We simply left the tap on _way_ too long.
In these cases, cutting expenses by firing people is usually the first step, since the business' revenue stream can usually continue on autopilot for a while.
I expect Twitter to report record-breaking profits next quarter and Twitter's share price to go up accordingly. Maybe even enough to fill in some of Musk's hole.
LBOs were a cure to the poison of the post-war conglomerate [1]. Those were run as personal fiefdoms by aloof executives and their cronies.
The traditional check was M&A. Conglomerates having no clean competitors, this–in practice–meant a buyer putting up cash and borrowing the rest, buying the company, taking out a loan in the company's name, using that to pay themselves and then paying back the personal loan. The only purpose the buyer's credit served was to gatekeep. LBOs compress that process, letting anyone challenge management if they can convince investors/lenders to back their vision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conglomerate_(company)
The debt financing burden is a further burden on Musk: twitter generates no free cash flow. Musk has to pay the creditors, and his co-investors are not likely to put in more cash. Musk and every other investor bought-in to a deal that now would be valued at about half what they paid. Depending on how the debt is secured, this also means twice the percentage of the company's value is now encumbered by that debt. That means that if Twitter were sold today the equity investors could lose nearly their entire investment.
Even a lousy LBO would be of a company you can asset-strip to reduce the debt. What could Twitter sell? The financing really does not make sense.
To date there's:
- Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing.
- Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription
- Reports that he may lay people off (unverified)
- Carried in a sink.
None of these things are particularly unreasonable - Twitter owes something like 1 billion in debt payments this year and brings in close to $500 million, so layoffs were probably coming regardless.
I don't really see what the big deal with Musk buying Twitter is, except as cover for being mad about him unbanning people.
> None of these things are particularly unreasonable
Six business days to come up with a system to process $6m per month of income.
Nothing unreasonable indeed...
Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.
It's possible that Musk is trying to set the reasonable expectation that a total comp package worth $400k should be exchanged for actual productivity, rather than playtime and busywork.
Which single developer can rollout payments globally in 6 days? How much time do they set aside to ensuring regulatory compliance with dozens of jurisdictions that have occasionally conflicting rules?
I too thought I could rewrite twitter and instagram in 10 days with a few JS and PHP framework when I was fresh out of uni
Tell me you've never been hired at Twitter without telling me you've never been hired at Twitter, lol. Every company has some dead weight, sure, but what you describe isn't remotely applicable to most people.
Would you want to be in that kind of situation?
As a salaried SE, why would you care? Or is that about SV's love for paying in stock instead of cash?
> then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.
That's an unconfirmed rumor at best, a lie most likely.
The difference is that usually it's not covered minute-by-minute on all the major news outlets.
No one would want to be in this situation yet it happens every day. Where I'm at, new VPs take over our division every couple years and every time they reorganize everything, rename everything, promote some people, lay off a bunch of people, bring in their "people", change polices and procedures, etc. It sucks but it's part of business as far as I can tell. If I walked out every time this happened I think I'd be hard pressed to keep a steady job.
New ownership seems to have changed that, not only in the things that were rumored they would do, but also in the abysmal communication during the whole thing.
This kind of thing happens all the time and it's always a risk, but that doesn't mean that people have to like it.
> None of these things are particularly unreasonable
I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?
You know this?
How do the designers who work at these tech companies not understand that repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up? Nor incentivize others to link to it?
I know how it happens, I've designed many a KPI. Something so fundamental and important as the default non-user first-exerpience (not just a 'signup flow') should be evaluated more holistically than just looking at numbers.
But I guess when you have layers of middle managers it's safer to point to a spreadsheet than make hard choices.
They'll tolerate you if you produce content to help keep the paying users engaged, but plenty of businesses choose not to pursue customers who are unlikely to generate profit.
It absolutely does, and that is precisely why they keep doing it. It doesn't work for the kinds of people that browse hackernews, but that's not their core audience anyway.
It's like saying ads don't work because you and me never click them because we use an adblock. Clearly they do work, and quite well...
Enjoy :)
>He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,
- https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/1586812933043933184
> Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first
Are ads for logged-in users so more profitable that it's worth it?
This is likely true, but only if there's an X. Facebook's growing sign-in box as you scroll down is not easily clicked away from.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That’s why the Facebooks die and the Apples and Googles last.
You see videogames employing these psychological tactics constantly nowadays to completely min-max human behavior into spending money.
And I think that's probably true! But the person without much computer skills comes in with an expectation that stuff is gonna be hard. The egregious signup page isn't a surprise in that sense, it's just one of the many things they have to struggle with to use a computer.
An A/B then doesn't show any benefit for removing the signup page, only downside, because an A/B test only tests what happens if one feature changes. Our intuition can still be right; if we could do all the work to make it so a website is actually easy to use for someone without a lot of skills, like how Apple radically simplified the state of affairs with the iPod, that will positively defy peoples' expectations and make the app more accessible -- even if just simplifying any individual component doesn't do that.
Did get a phone-number nag that I was able to ticket myself out of.
Call me crazy, but maybe a site should be designed so people actually enjoy using it, rather than always optimizing for "growth".
https://nitter.net
Other instances here:
https://xnaas.github.io/nitter-instances/
the site works whenever i login via a fresh, private browser session. for a minute i thought i was blocked after muting the words "elon" and "musk"
Doesnt work for me
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816
Now, this of course assumes that engineering managers are not solely doing employee management but also are serving some "tech lead" type roles. I.e. even if an engineering manager isn't coding I think it's essential that (a) a considerable portion of their time is spent doing code reviews, (b) they should be working closely with product managers to define stories and requirements before the dev team starts implementing, etc.
That is, having line engineering managers solely do "people management" is universally a bad idea in my opinion. They should be getting their "hands dirty" in the tech aspects as well in order to be effective.
I doubt though that Musk can figure out the actual workhorse in a short time. The posers are very good at self promotion.
Weeding out those who change pronouns in documentation and agitate on Slack would be a reliable start. From there, close reading of PRs, their usefulness and code quality is required. LOC is not an indicator.
As for managers, most of them are useless.
Do either of these guys even know how to program? Calacanis has been making tech content for decades, and I've never once heard him talk about writing code.
Why not hire them into "Chief of Staff" or "Chief of Fuck You Parag" roles?
They both have plenty of experience running tech companies and are advising on structuring the team… I know everyone’s trying to jump on the hate bandwagon but this is a stretch.
Like I said though, I have no horse in this race, so whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1 - https://medium.com/craft-ventures/announcing-craft-iii-1-1-b...
However he tweeted that there are 10 people managing for every one dev. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816
Also Layoffs before vesting denied. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586831721386766337
Bring back Vine? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586918804780630016
Not sure I would trust in tweets much. Twitter took on a lot of debt.
What would the figure usually be.
You have marketing managers, people managing account maintenance, people managing bot reports, etc etc.
It seems to me, that's almost like complaining that an office or shop has 10 times more managers than maintenance guys. Both are locations where business are carried out rather than the actual business itself.
2. As another commenter mentioned, I don't even think this would be possible given California WARN Act requirements, but I'm less sure on the legal requirements here.
Large-scale labor law violations are not impossible, or even unprecedented for Musk-owned firms.
Did you expect him to say it is true?
Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous how people conflate "Elon is a bad guy who stretches the truth all the time" with him sending out a completely unambiguous statement that, if it were a lie, would easily be proven wrong in one day. Point being, people who do stretch the truth/over-promise know how to do it in a way that isn't falsifiable in 24 hours.
Just consider his infamous "Funding secured" tweet. I considered that a lie, but there is obviously enough wiggle room/deniability over what "secured" actually means. That's not the case here.
In any case, the deadline has already passed. If there were to have been mass layoffs before the Nov 1 deadline, it's too late.
Contract says you get the stock if you work for a certain period of time at the company. Consequently, if you're fired or quit before that period elapses, you don't get it.
Not sure if it applies to stock vesting. From what I understand, the main goal is to prevent an employer from firing someone at e.g. 19 years 11 months tenure purely to avoid paying them a pension.
Somehow I think they will be specially focusing on twitter more
1. It's not like this should come as a surprise to anyone at Twitter. If you work at Twitter and haven't been updating your resume and reaching out to other contacts, don't know what to say.
2. Remains to be seen what severance package laid off employees get, but with the California WARN requirements I think it's likely to be at least a couple months, which is fair. Looks like Musk tried to screw over some of the top execs by firing "for cause" (and note, in an exec's contract "for cause" can't just be "we don't like the job you did", it pretty much always has specific stipulations about breaking laws or company policy, e.g. sexual harassment), but they have more than enough resources to sue if necessary.
3. Is there anyone who reasonably thinks that Twitter has a lot of unproductive employees that should be let go? I think unions can do a lot of good, but not if it's the standard "once you're in the union it's nearly impossible to let you go" situation. Highly productive employees hate working with people who just "phone it in".
For example, I can't imagine the WaPo taking this same tone with regard to a Bezos acquisition or contract, or publishing confidential leaked details of inside business discussion, as it would almost certainly upset their owner and lead to 'a change in leadership' at the Post. The same is true of their coverage of the unionization effort at Amazon warehouses and distribution centers. Similarly, the CIA and NSA deals that AWS has engaged in aren't getting this level of scrutiny from the Post either, and there's little chance of the Post ever printing anything [like the 2010] "Top Secret America" series on how defense contracts are doled out to intelligence contractors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America
"(2020) Amazon: We Totally Don’t Want To Spy On You. Also Amazon: We Just Hired The Architect Of The NSA’s Mass Domestic Surveillance Program"
https://dailycaller.com/2020/09/10/amazon-surveillance-nsa-d...
However, most people view that outlet as a highly partisan right-wing opinion-centric source (with rather limited sources), not at all the 'traditional unbiased news media' - which instead avoid the story, and instead just churn out a stream of pro-government, pro-corporate propaganda 24/7. This is pretty unhealthy IMO, since, ahem, 'democracy dies in darkness', and is the kind of behavior you see from Chinese and Russian state media, not from independent journalism.
They didn’t wake up in 2013 and suddenly decide they won’t have any integrity.
However, your point is pretty valid - back in 2002, the WaPo regurgitated US government talking points on (non-existent) Iraq WMDs without bothering to do any investigative pushback.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/10/11/c...
What more are you expecting from them?
Uhhh... you must not ever read WaPo. They run critical coverage of Bezos and Amazon all of the time.
Bezos bought a new paper, so he can have a mouth piece when he needs it.
Musk just bought a bigger mouth piece, without any of those pesky editors.
Musk and his investors just bought a massive amount of power. Which We basically lost.
Welcome to the oligarchy.
Part of me hopes he does, because that's the only way the Tall Poppy Syndrome folks have any chance of learning. But most of me has more empathy than they do.
More than likely they’re fairly normal employees. Granted they make more than most but that doesn’t mean they have “Tall Poppy Syndrome”.
The ONLY bad guys in this scenario are Musk and his yes-men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
The Tall Poppy Syndrome folks are not those at Twitter. I know a few, and respect them, and have no problem with them making more than most (as I did myself when I worked at FB). No, the TPS folks are those right here bashing Twitter employees, as you yourself complained about. I don't know who they are, but I do know how they act because they're acting out right here in front of us.
> The ONLY bad guys in this scenario are Musk and his yes-men
So you no longer have a problem with the haters? What changed in the last two hours?
The video was posted by a remote financial analyst who was visiting the SF office for the first time. She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time. The perks are nice, maybe too nice you could argue, but the notion that the video proves she (and other Twitter workers) don't do any "real work" is idiotic. It's a short video, a tiny sample of her work day -- why would she dedicate any portion of it to showing her crunching numbers in Excel or whatever?
This just adds fuel to the fire that for the most part Twitter has a bunch of part time employee getting very high full time wages.
Now there is a large segment of the population that believe 32 hour work weeks should be standard, if your one of those then I suppose their posts will not spark much respond, but for most people that will spark strong negative emotions.
> She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time.
then it should not be labeled as "a day in the life"
Watching the video the person comes away with an impression this is more than just 1 hour of the day. I also suspect you are giving this person far too much credit for the amount of work they did that day. I am guessing it was more like 1 hour of real work, couple hours of meetings, and the rest socializing / using the "amenities"
Also, if you are going to the office after being remote, meetings and discussions tend are always the point. Otherwise you could have stayed at home.
showing your biases a little too much there, aren't you?
If I could make one plea to Elon, it would be to move Twitter out of Silicon Valley as fast as possible
She is shown scheduling a 30 minute meeting which seems to be the only work done before getting ready for lunch. After lunch plays foosball and meditation and exploring. Now that might be entirely reasonable if she comes to work at 11am and leaves in the evening or clocks back on to do some work at night, or did a bunch of other work before lunch. And having a lot of meetings is what happens when you're a remote worker who comes into the office once a year. None of that comes across to in the video though so what it actually looks like is about 3 hours of meetings (which are mostly taking pictures of one another), and the rest of it lounging around eating and drinking and unwinding.
1. Twitter, the core application, is literally a weekend junior dev project. The only engineers on the payroll who provide actual value, out of THOUSANDS, are those who scale the application and infrastructure. The vast majority of these people have been paid huge comp packages for doing effectively nothing. Sure, there are auxilliary applications like the ad platform, business intelligence, etc, but there is no world in which you need the enormous engineering staff they have to build or run these. Most of these people are useless.
2. Twitter employees have been complicit in curbing free speech, in a highly partisan manner, for years now.
> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next
I suspect that if you provide actual, tangible value and you're not actively silencing people for using the wrong pronouns, you'll be safe.
edit: typoz
This would assume that the previous management had an incentive to cut costs and remove 50% of their workforce... which is probably not the case at all.
They probably don't know who the unproductive ones are anymore because without a fresh look at things they can't think about it objectively. They give tasks to people and they get done at the same speed as they've always been done with. How do you suddenly decide: Hey actually guys, I know we were working like this for 6 years but actually, we should be 40% faster on every single task so... you know.. start working faster please and everyone who doesn't gets fired. It's just not realistic for existing managers to do this for so many reasons. Unless absolutely forced by financial realities which was apparently never the case for Twitter.
Previous management at Twitter didn't own a significant percentage of the company shares. Why be the "bad guy" when the paychecks are still rolling in? But when it's your "own money" at stake, you get much more motivated to cut unnecessary costs. Even if that makes lots of people on the Internet hate you.
Your original comment stated: "If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore."
Therefore you, not I, implied that there are relatively unproductive workers at Twitter (not unreasonable, of course - there's always going to be a performance spectrum) - and you suggested that the previous management would have removed them if there was an easy way to identify them.
This is what I was disagreeing with - your premise that the previous management would have removed their most unproductive 50% if there was an easy way to identify them.
Potentially, but not necessarily. Some high performers may reasonably think "finally someone who is going to cut through all the bullshit in this bloated company and demand some accountability". Look through some of the stories when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple; it wasn't that dissimilar.
Now, that said, folks like this usually want and demand an inspiring leader. Some may think Musk fits the bill for that (I think I probably would have years ago), but these days I usually just want him to STFU with so much of the bullshit nonsense he sends out. I mean, the day after he closed the Twitter deal he tweeted a blatantly ridiculous and libelous story about Paul Pelosi - it's just more of the same stupid shit from him.
As for employees being happy that "lazy" people are being fired, if that's true why are companies so cautious about hiring and firing?
Isn't the Tesla software allegedly a horrific mess? I suspect they may have been taking notes, instead.