Not only this, but he's demanding people work 12+ hour days through weekends or get fired "for cause".
He's doing everything he can to make layoffs happen without actually laying people off, which sure seems like he's trying to evade California's 60 day warning for layoffs.
I suspect we'll see him in court over how this was handled.
Up to but not including "constructive dismissal". The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission(EEOC) provides a three part test to evaluate constructive dismissal[1]:
1. a reasonable person in the complainant's position would have found the working conditions intolerable
2. conduct that constituted discrimination against the complainant created the intolerable working conditions
3. the complainant's involuntary resignation resulted from the intolerable working conditions
The test isn't necessarily something we would be able to make a definitive decision on here. It is intended to be used in the courtroom where each component would be necessary to establish constructive dismissal and evidence for and contrary to each point would be presented to a judge/jury.
As you can rightly assume "reasonable", "intolerable", and "discrimination" are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I'd expect and decision to rest on what constitutes "reasonable", "intolerable", and "discrimination".
The department of labor does. Even here in Idaho it's amazing how excited the legal team gets when sent a letter of inquiry from the DoL. I imagine they have more teeth in CA.
Yes. The set of conditions that make it illegal to fire somebody in the US are very very small. "I need everybody to crunch 80 hour weeks for months and months" is a thing employers can do for most forms of white collar knowledge work.
There's already a class action suit underway regarding Tesla's mass constructive dismissal, so it'll be really interesting to see all this go down. In the US, there are two things to consider: legality, and lawsuits. Regardless of legality, you can still drown in lawsuits.
He's mentioned several times that him expecting his employees to work 10-12 hours a day is ok because he himself works 18+ hours. How does he expect to retain employees when other companies pay way more than Tesla does for way fewer work hours? Am I missing something?
> How does he expect to retain employees when other companies pay way more than Tesla does for way fewer work hours? Am I missing something?
Cults?
At least for Telsa and SpaceX, his propaganda (PR) efforts have established some grand "for the good of humanity" narratives," for the companies, and passionate true-believers are easily exploited.
Does he really work 18+ hour days, practically speaking? It’s not Musk Co, Tesla, space ex and twitter are three different companies. I may not care how he spends his time, but time spent not working for the company I work for might as well be spent basketweaving. I work 18 hour days too, I have my wife job, my kids job, my watching tv job and my tech job.
Elon has a fascinating ability to make people look at things from his point of view.
Suppose the story was something like “Jeff Bezos acquires company, immediately slashes workforce, maneuvers to avoid paying severance, reportedly forces engineers to work nights and weekends under threat of dismissal (and probably will lay them off anyway).”
The tech community would be pretty united in saying the engineers would have to take care of themselves first in this situation.
But when it comes to Musk, the community is more amenable to looking at it from a business perspective. I have seen a sentiment of “tough shit, if you don’t like it then quit, he has no obligation to you.” There are many who call the engineers entitled or otherwise resent them for pursuing a strategy of “weather the storm until assured of some kind of severance and then immediately quit.”
Hackers are a community that rail against upper management for being out of touch and implementing stupid processes, but when it comes to Musk allegedly telling engineers to print their code on paper, some say “well that’s not too much effort, plus you’re being paid to do what management asks, so don’t whine about it.”
I have been accused of looking at this entirely through the lens of hating Musk, but I imagine that many are looking at this entirely through the lens of hating Twitter.
Pretty short-sighted imo. My opinion about new leadership forcing engineers to work nights and weekends is entirely unaffected by the company’s former PR strategy for handling culture war issues.
I think most people in the community recognize that Musk is a pretty abusive boss, and everyone really good is leaving the company. There are a few people who can't protect themselves from a predator, and those people will get relentlessly predated upon until they learn their lesson. It may well be fine: even Truth Social (mostly) works, and nobody thinks they're hiring the best engineers in the world.
I mean as long as nobody tries to hack or exploit Twitter, in which case things are gonna go very badly. Particularly since the people he's firing probably have root on a lot of boxes.
> "...and everyone really good is leaving the company."
Then all of those people should have absolutely no problem finding another job.
As for Musk and Twitter, it's been such a cesspool and a biased bubble of groupthink that I think many outsiders (i.e. your average user) is willing to give Musk a chance at doing what he thinks needs to be done.
Yeah, that was a really weird post. Labelling Musk "abusive" and characterizing him as a "predator," and then a veiled threat about possible hacking from all of the people who have root on the boxes.
For something to be a threat I would have to be at Twitter, which I'm not. It's not a threat: I think it's a risk. You announce you're going to fire 75% of a company on day one, you haven't taken steps to secure the infrastructure before spreading chaos, that's a huge gamble. I'm sure the folks at Twitter are all ethical enough that nothing bad will happen, but doing this this way is sure playing with fire.
Telling people to "ship a feature in a week or you're fired" is abusive as hell. And this isn't some clever three-dimensional gambit to get people to quit: Musk has done this elsewhere as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...
> Elon has a fascinating ability to make people look at things from his point of view.
Honestly, he seems to have a very effective propaganda (i.e. "public relations") effort behind him. With unusual frequency, I'll see someone regurgitate some propagandistic talking point without any hint of irony (e.g. answering criticism of him with "Musk is literally saving humanity, what have you done?").
I don't know how much of that is from effort (e.g. astroturf) or just hitting the right nerve and getting people to work for him for free (e.g. very online nerds who believe in sci-fi, so put their faith in Musk personally because he constantly claims he'll make some their sci-fi dreams come true).
I feel like I'm often accused of being that person but it's not just with him, it's usually with any divisive person. I greatly dislike the habit of people try and dismiss everything a person has done because they have done one or several things that they are against so I'm often seen "defending" controversial figures.
I don't have any particular love for Musk nor would I want to work for any of his companies but it's incredibly frustrating to me to see people pretend like taking EVs mainstream and re-usable rockets aren't an incredible feats that he's played a large part in accomplishing (even if it's just by funding, for the people who say "he didn't do any of that work!"). And he's objectively a good businessman, given that the metric for business is money.
Some communities are incapable of espousing anything positive about people that they've deemed the enemy.
I absolutely despise Twitter and their mods, so seeing layoffs is lovely schadenfreude.
You cannot remove a sitting President when you’re functionally the town square. We now know COVID almost certainly was a lab leak. You don’t get to enforce your views on the world forever - this is gravity pulling down the bubble.
I've always thought that those people are the ones who must have made out like bandits when TSLA was in the upswing. There used to be stories about TSLA millionaires. Those people still exist somewhere. I assume many are thinking Musk can do no wrong given he changed their lives.
This kind of reminds me of the same attitude engineers (I can't speak for other cohorts) had about Apples appstore rules. It is a private entity. It is apple. Apples cares about it's users. Use something else. Yada yada yada. Now the same engineers complain about how unfair and monopolistic it is. Different horses for different courses!
>There'll be plenty of people willing to work for cheap for Musk
Is this true? I buy that there are plenty of people willing to work on Tesla or SpaceX or even things like hyperloop. But do people have the same passion for Twitter?
Musk seems to have a reality-distortion field like Jobs did. I absolutely know people who heard him talk about "The X App" and would quickly jump ship to work for him. I don't understand it at all, but he does seem to command this sort of following.
There are definitely some Elon Musk fanboys out there. They're just not on HN.
What's kind of annoying is that as a Tesla owner, many people assume I'm an Elon fanboy. Nah, I don't really like him. I applaud his ability to take risks, but I wish he'd shut the hell up sometimes.
I think most of the fanboys like him for his personality, and don't actually have any relevant technical skills. They commonly think building your own PC(literally, plugging things into the only slot they will fit into) is the pinnacle of tech geekiness.
Even as someone who finds Musk really unpalatable at this point, if I thought I had a skill that was a good fit at SpaceX I might be tempted, but Twitter? I'd rather contribute to Mastodon or another Fediverse project. Not because I hate Twitter - I spend a lot of time on Twitter - but because I don't see it as an interesting enough or worthwhile challenge before Musk.
After his takeover I wouldn't even consider it, so I think you're right to question this.
Of course he'll find someone, but whether it'll be the right people is another matter.
What is the low hanging fruit in terms of changing the product? Can there be different 'streams' of twitter users? Moderation ala reddit? How will light touch moderation actually work given the garbage that will rise to the surface (child porn, beheading videos) that will kill advertising?
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadHe's doing everything he can to make layoffs happen without actually laying people off, which sure seems like he's trying to evade California's 60 day warning for layoffs.
I suspect we'll see him in court over how this was handled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal#United_...
1. a reasonable person in the complainant's position would have found the working conditions intolerable
2. conduct that constituted discrimination against the complainant created the intolerable working conditions
3. the complainant's involuntary resignation resulted from the intolerable working conditions
The test isn't necessarily something we would be able to make a definitive decision on here. It is intended to be used in the courtroom where each component would be necessary to establish constructive dismissal and evidence for and contrary to each point would be presented to a judge/jury.
As you can rightly assume "reasonable", "intolerable", and "discrimination" are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I'd expect and decision to rest on what constitutes "reasonable", "intolerable", and "discrimination".
1. https://federalemployeelawblog.com/2017/07/10/constructive-d...
Question from Europe: Is that actually legal in the US? :-O
Cults?
At least for Telsa and SpaceX, his propaganda (PR) efforts have established some grand "for the good of humanity" narratives," for the companies, and passionate true-believers are easily exploited.
Suppose the story was something like “Jeff Bezos acquires company, immediately slashes workforce, maneuvers to avoid paying severance, reportedly forces engineers to work nights and weekends under threat of dismissal (and probably will lay them off anyway).”
The tech community would be pretty united in saying the engineers would have to take care of themselves first in this situation.
But when it comes to Musk, the community is more amenable to looking at it from a business perspective. I have seen a sentiment of “tough shit, if you don’t like it then quit, he has no obligation to you.” There are many who call the engineers entitled or otherwise resent them for pursuing a strategy of “weather the storm until assured of some kind of severance and then immediately quit.”
Hackers are a community that rail against upper management for being out of touch and implementing stupid processes, but when it comes to Musk allegedly telling engineers to print their code on paper, some say “well that’s not too much effort, plus you’re being paid to do what management asks, so don’t whine about it.”
Hackers may have even more contempt for the slackers and sanctimonious activists currently at Twitter.
This is just like the far-left and the far-right aligning with Russia, because they loathe their immediate opposition so much.
I have been accused of looking at this entirely through the lens of hating Musk, but I imagine that many are looking at this entirely through the lens of hating Twitter.
Pretty short-sighted imo. My opinion about new leadership forcing engineers to work nights and weekends is entirely unaffected by the company’s former PR strategy for handling culture war issues.
The "internet of beefs" is very real. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ (not a Rao supporter, but this essay is so spot on at describing the phenomenon)
I mean as long as nobody tries to hack or exploit Twitter, in which case things are gonna go very badly. Particularly since the people he's firing probably have root on a lot of boxes.
Then all of those people should have absolutely no problem finding another job.
As for Musk and Twitter, it's been such a cesspool and a biased bubble of groupthink that I think many outsiders (i.e. your average user) is willing to give Musk a chance at doing what he thinks needs to be done.
Telling people to "ship a feature in a week or you're fired" is abusive as hell. And this isn't some clever three-dimensional gambit to get people to quit: Musk has done this elsewhere as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...
I mean, he didn’t do this. It was reported he was planning to, and then he said he wasn’t going to, and then so far it hasn’t happened.
Honestly, he seems to have a very effective propaganda (i.e. "public relations") effort behind him. With unusual frequency, I'll see someone regurgitate some propagandistic talking point without any hint of irony (e.g. answering criticism of him with "Musk is literally saving humanity, what have you done?").
I don't know how much of that is from effort (e.g. astroturf) or just hitting the right nerve and getting people to work for him for free (e.g. very online nerds who believe in sci-fi, so put their faith in Musk personally because he constantly claims he'll make some their sci-fi dreams come true).
I don't have any particular love for Musk nor would I want to work for any of his companies but it's incredibly frustrating to me to see people pretend like taking EVs mainstream and re-usable rockets aren't an incredible feats that he's played a large part in accomplishing (even if it's just by funding, for the people who say "he didn't do any of that work!"). And he's objectively a good businessman, given that the metric for business is money.
Some communities are incapable of espousing anything positive about people that they've deemed the enemy.
You cannot remove a sitting President when you’re functionally the town square. We now know COVID almost certainly was a lab leak. You don’t get to enforce your views on the world forever - this is gravity pulling down the bubble.
Is this true? I buy that there are plenty of people willing to work on Tesla or SpaceX or even things like hyperloop. But do people have the same passion for Twitter?
What's kind of annoying is that as a Tesla owner, many people assume I'm an Elon fanboy. Nah, I don't really like him. I applaud his ability to take risks, but I wish he'd shut the hell up sometimes.
After his takeover I wouldn't even consider it, so I think you're right to question this.
Of course he'll find someone, but whether it'll be the right people is another matter.
Wouldn't be surprised if Twitter loses some 9s & other quality and a competitor eats their lunch with a clone. Reminds me of the death of Digg.