It also leads to more mistakes and cutting corners (usually hidden), so in the long term as they accumulate this will bite him in the ass when a particularly bad one gets out in the wild unnoticed.
And I thought this guy had a high IQ, clearly he's not that bright after all.
No I guess not.
His rants on social media have cost him in the past.
I believe he may have psychopathic tendencies because he appears to be attempting to project his own work ethic (long hours etc) onto staff but cannot emphasize with them, or understand they aren't him/have his circumstances/have his ability.
His goals are great and have certainly pushed our tech boundaries into near science fiction, but he really doesn't have the social and people skills, which is ironic given he's bought Twitter.
If there was one thing I could tell him, it's that he should engage his brain before his mouth, a little (benevolent) social manipulation to get what he wants will be more successful before he barks orders for long hours or sacks people at short notice.
Carrot before the stick.
- Boeing laughed at SpaceX and their proposed rocket re-use and cheap(er) space flight. Now Boeing is the no.3 supplier to NASA, SpaceX at 2 and playing catch up.
- Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)
- No other US company has announced humanoid robots aside from Boston Dynamics, which are not for the general public.
- Tesla has pushed for secondary industries such battery invovation and solar roof tiles (not regular panels on roofs). This in itself is not new but is a future green environment goal.
- The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
- How many non governmental industries can offer Ukraine help with something like Starlink? Can't be many... (honestly don't know but initially seems altruistic).
I'm afraid you have drunk the kool aid. Self-driving cars are an idea as old as the car itself, and many companies are much further along than Tesla who are stuck on their "no LIDAR" stance when LIDAR is rapidly becoming cheaper and more available. Almost ironic from the company that bet on lithium batteries for cars.
The robots are a demo gag (much like the smart summon, or the cybertruck, or the semi, or ..).
The "solar tiles" are a fire hazard and the Tesla solar business a total shambles, which makes sense since it was just a nepotistic bailout of Solarcity.
Hyperloop is dead and so is the Boring company.
> - Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)
Tesla was founded in 2003, and self driving wasn't a thing to think about back then.
> - The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
It's worth noting that what they're pushing is not tunneling technology but a particular mass transit system that is essentially a repackaging of personal rapid transit (PRT). Although, unlike the PRT system constructed 50 years ago and every other PRT system built since, Musk's version requires human drivers (as it relies on unmodified Tesla vehicles which are not self-driving).
Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There was a recent telling interview by someone who used to work there who thought it wouldn't be long until the whole thing collapses on its own because there were huge teams dedicated to simply keeping the thing running.
A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140 characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run on my 4 year old desktop.
Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the bet Musk is making too.
What a terribly dishonest and overly-simplistic way of modeling of a distributed system much less a simple web service.
found the engineer who, in their own words, “couldn’t code their way out of paper bag.”
It’s pretty laughable you believe your own “math.”
I guess even serving an actual front end doesn’t factor into your calculations. Hey go build something and you might find out what it actually takes to build/maintain a system of any real consequence instead of doing leet code exercises and smelling your own brain farts.
In the same vein, look at how Plenty of Fish has a huge customer base, and runs on very skimpy hardware. Back in 2006 it had 45M visitors a month, served up over 1B page views a month, all running off three database servers and two load balanced webservers. Guess how many employees? One, Markus Frind[1].
Twitter has about 10x that monthly visitor number just in mDAU. And pof has scaled 100x! (To 100 employees — that seems pretty insane relative the traffic they have going by this weird metric of “amount of data served should roughly equal the number of employees by some ratio”). Comparison also seems a bit lacking given the difference in magnitude also the engineering problems involved (e.g. moderation, botting etc.) Guessing also that creating a dating site is not an exercise in needing a lot of skilled engineering work given it’s been a solved set of problems since the late 90s. Hey Verizon has 132,000 employees — I guess they should only need a fraction of that right since consumer cellular has 2,400?
Revenue-wise I think a fake checkmarked Nintendo being up with a photo of mario doing the middle finger for hours does a lot, and spells not great stuff. My understanding is that advertisers aren't even locking in contracts for next year or similar.
I bet advertisers LOVE this situation. They probably weren't excited about how centralized systems are, which robs them of some of their say and power in the ecosystem. This is an opportunity for them to show what control and influence they have and basically a warning to others not to toy with their demands.
Twitter has already been having reliability issues for weeks or more, that's not going to get better if you lay off a bunch of your ops and sweng personnel
Yeah but if they want to do anything more than struggle to fight fires 24/7 they need at least average people, and management that trusts them, and buy in for the work needed to make a robust system.
It's amazing how many techies seem to be unable to understand this as if there was still infinite VC money and cash raising via stock sale for every company that can't figure out how to make money.
If we get a general tech correction as part of this downturn things are going to be very different for companies that have been burning money for years.
It's fun to read about this stuff in the news and comment on it here and on Twitter but the reality couldn't be more different. If you're qualified enough to be in the running to work at Twitter, you likely have many options available to you (employment wise). None of those people are trying to go work at Twitter because there's just too much BS flying around over there.
If this keeps up the only way Twitter is going to be able to attract talent IMO is by offering massive comp packages, because that's the only way you're going to get people that aren't die hard Twitter/Elon Musk fans to want to come there.
All tech companies have been hiring bottom of the barrel engineers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. This is just a realignment where where knowing how to put the lego pieces together isn't enough any more.
> subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue
A lofty ambition indeed. Getting $5billion out of twitter users or an anual subscription of $15 out of 100% of the users sounds like hard work. However, if you drop the avertising revenue to $350 million you can do the WhatsApp $1 a year model.
YouTube and Twitter are, at least currently, very different services. Even if it's the same, the fact is that this $8 needs to not only supplement existing ad revenue but replace it, which makes the financial challenges worse than if it were merely $8 for perks.
It seems that Musk at this point is completely unaware that he is a walking contradiction.
On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving towards the future.
On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force his employees to work under his total control. He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.
Cutting edge technologist for the investors, old school factory owner for managing people. Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money.
True, but the fact that technology is going to reinvent everything, including work seems to be an oversight. I'm not sure an old school factory owner is going to attract the best people in a highly skilled industry
> The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.
This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0] so interesting.
From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:
> "2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"
So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly driving this.
As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in quite the same way when public) and then going public again once this restructuring process has been completed.
People that quit voluntarily are always skewed towards the high end, because better employees have an easier time finding another job with similar benefits/pay but has that one thing they want.
The only way this would make sense as a downsizing tactic would be if you believe that employees that prefer to work remote (enough to the point where they would consider quitting) are significantly worse than the average Twitter employee.
This is exactly why in my country the law uses the concept of 'acquired rights'.
Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.
Most high GDP countries don't have a business culture of optimizing for maximum cash in the owners hand at all possible costs, and indeed, even are interested in giving their employees a fair shake. Most places understand that employees are valuable and deserve dignity and respect, and have taken steps to ensure they get it.
> he can't force his employees to work under his total control
That is because he actually can force them to be under his control.
> He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralized offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralized offices.
I don't think he cares about their lives. Meanwhile, long hours in office have multiple advantages for controlling CEO like Musk. The people are removed from outside influences (friends, family, time to read) and closed in his own echo chamber. Whatever he wants to normalize, it will be harder for them to see is not normal outside of that bubble. It is another variant on what cults, monasteries, armies etc do ... the more they isolate you from outside influences, the better you surrender own agency.
Plus, people not comfortable with above self exclude. It is win win win for ceo. Not necessary effective, but produces strong loyalty and obeisance. Which has advantages also for productivity.
Creative and innovative - absolutely not. Effective - mostly not, except in some situations. There are many ways how to be ineffective tho, this is one of them many. I think that you dont need to be super effective to compete in the technology industry.
Will he be able to compete? I dont know. Musk twitter moves seem incompetent overall to me. But so far, his charizma and money (to certain people) did allowed him to get quite far in his previous companies. He did treated his previous employees pretty much the same way.
if you look at musk and his friends talking about how to restructure twitter it looks less incompetent. if you remember that he is under a mountain of financial pressure you can also see that these moves are for survival, not to make twitter more awesome. a decimated shell of a company is preferable, for someone who just massively overpaid for a non-growth company, to a much larger organization with higher cost structure.
I dont understand why he wanted twitter and I think the incompetence is in the way he pursued the deal, but once one is saddled with such a problem the steps to get out from under it (or at least minimize the damage) are clear. forcing employees out is necessary.
It still looks incompetent. Especially in the area of treating advisers. And in the way he is rolling out new feature, no wait, he does not, cancel that out, actually it is going to be done ... nope, yes. Print out code on paper, nope, shredder it actually.
> you can also see that these moves are for survival
They don't seem like moves of survival. They seem impulsive, emotional and causing him damage.
> forcing employees out is necessary
He just had layoff. Literally, it is not like he would need to send midnight eamils about going back to office tomorrow to make them go.
The thing I read that made the most sense is that he never wanted it. He wanted to use the buyout as cover for selling a bunch of Tesla stock. No due diligence was done because he fully expected to just back out of the deal, but that didn't happen because he and his billionaire buddies were not so happy about getting deposed and dragging all their dirty laundry into the public.
He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money.
Idk why he gets so much support. That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.
Have you heard that didn't invent them or even start the company or even cofound it?
Anyways, yes, he has done a lot of good and is actually smart. But it has also gone to his head and the more power and wealth he accrues the more it shows. Like with most people.
Mindlessly bashing him is just as much of a waste of time as mindlessly sucking his knob.
> Tesla was founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California. [...] Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later.[2] The three went looking for venture capital (VC) funding in January 2004[2] and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million[10] round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors.[2] Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO.[11] J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004[2] as the fifth employee.[12] A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.[13]
> Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.[14] Eberhard acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from the beginning on a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body and that Musk led design of components ranging from the power electronics module to the headlamps and other styling.[15]
Correct. The future of sustainable transportation is the electric trolley, the electric train, the electric bus, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle.
It is not a largely-single-occupant two-and-a-half-ton electric sedan.
> What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?
Well, it's his (and your) right to be wrong but that's a belief that was already on very shaky ground before 2020 and has by this point been absolutely proven wrong.
Unless your job actually requires physical interaction with or proximity to a thing or other people it can almost certainly be done equally well remotely.
Processes may have to be adjusted to account for remote workers and even the way people work when working remotely, but almost 100% of jobs that take place at a desk in front of a computer can and should be allowed to be remote.
The biggest thing that doesn't work in a remote environment is micromanagement, so bad bosses who feel the need to micromanage hate it, but those people are terrible so if they don't like it that's a good thing.
I don’t know, it seems not much creatively came out of tech since 2020. It’s all continuing trends started before that or living on past glory. I think you could easily argue that creativity is down in the industry.
What are you using arrive at this opinion? What creativity existed in a measurable way before 2020 and what does that metric look like now? Who is less creative in this environment and in what ways are they less creative? What amount of creativity is necessary for a business to operate successfully or solve meaningful problems?
Not all problems require new or genuinely creative solutions either. And it seems really difficult to try and measure the creative output by individual contributors at any given company. You have no way of gleaning the micro decisions or solutions that people come up with for their internal issues. So this doesn't seem like one could "easily argue" this point at all, in fact it seems quite difficult.
Are you suggesting that product offerings are less creative as a whole? And if so, again what metric are you using to arrive at this conclusion? And are there really no trends of this same metric before 2020?
Why are you surprised? He wants employees in space and on Mars where he'll have even greater control (when employees start/leave employment, all information in/out of their station, the amount of mass employees will own, and even control when authorities are allowed on the station if at all).
Over summer, tech companies were offering wheelbarrows full of cash to potential employees. Love him or hate him, once he started f'ing around at twitter, why would anyone have stayed?
Unless you really desperately wanted to be in the presence of the man himself, and maybe thought he was going to buy you a horse in exchange for something
It's been 2 weeks since he officially bought it, but working at twitter (and even as an outsider just reading the news), you see the writing on the wall. There were tons of reports of planned layoffs, and the changes that Elon wanted to see in the company. None of what he is doing is surprising, least of all to Twitter employees.
Companies have always known that employees will put up with abysmal conditions to some level. The stress, effort, insecurity, and fear of finding a new job has always had an extreme value to most people.
Layoffs started over the summer. Hiring freezes had been implemented.
I'm sure many twitter employees thought he would drag his feet or the deal would fall through, and they'd have at least a year+ of time before he comes in.
Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that. On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone come in and clean house / shake things up would be very exciting.
The podcast Hard Fork interviewed (with disguised voices) 2 current twitter employees (both had been there a long time). The GP is right, it's a terrible environment.
I survived two rounds of layoffs before I jumped ship.
The work environment was just wasn’t pleasant after the first round.
Actually I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d be happy people got let go. (Even I felt kinda bad when “annoying talk politics everyday real loud for at least 30 minutes while everyone is working hard guy” got let go)..
Unless Musk is giving existing workers a ton of ISOs I don’t see why they should care at all how Twitter does at this point. A worker being excited about a shakeup entailing significantly less freedom, and significantly more work, stress and instability has got to have a bad case of brain worms.
Layoffs are always morale-killers. Twitter isn't particularly special in this regard, and if Twitter found a way to lay off 50% within 3 days to a boost of morale to the remaining workforce that would be finally be the one truly innovative accomplishment its done, lol.
Even the biggest Musk fanboy at Twitter isn't immune to the morale hit from a doubling or trebling of their workload because their team was cut in half from layoffs. What consolation is the company "getting back on course" if you've got to work 70+ hour weeks for the next several months. No time off, sleeping at your desk, never seeing family, and certainly no holiday time off. At the end you now work for a Musk company so your compensation will lag the SV mean.
I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels happy. That's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.
Many technical parts of the company had 80% layoffs last week. The people who quit or quiet quit over this senseless RTO mandate will push the company into an unrecoverable brain drain, if they're not already there.
I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective.
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
And the fact that Twitter employees aren't all near an office. If you live in Minneapolis, you're not exactly going to be happy that you have to go into the office (closest one is 6+ hours away in Chicago). It's not even a choice to go into the office or not at that point - it's an ultimatum of move immediately for a job where everything is on fire or be fired!
I'm beginning to think that collective distributed satellite offices is going to be big. Like WeWork but for companies to house their local staff and far less culty. Would help if they had standing desks, folding treadmills, three screens and everything else for a superb dev experience that is a bit of a pain to set up at home.
That's your choice. I would love to be within 15 minutes walk of my office, but I can't realistically afford it, so the choice of a longer commute is made for me.
IMHO the ideal situation would be for people to work in their own offices, with doors that closed, and short commutes. Easy to work distraction-free alone, easy to have group meetings and random chats.
But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
> But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.
I assume the larger portion of what's "untenable" is "short commutes"; spending multiple hours of unpaid personal time in a car per day just driving to and from work so that you can have the place you sleep be affordable is a huge downside of a lot of in-person jobs that used to be taken as more of a default pre-pandemic, before so many places showed "yeah we could let you work from home but we just don't want to".
The downsides of an open floor plan can be at least partially countered by headphones, but there's much less that you can do on an individual level to make up for having that much of your personal time locked up in pure transit.
Remote work has changed a lot, but construction in the places where the big tech companies are headquarters is highly constrained. It’s not like they all could immediately triple the size of their campuses again. Tech companies did build large new campuses at enormous cost, but mostly development crowded out other development. Everyone is bidding for the same land and labor.
Reasonably, one company could give everyone an office but there’s no way everyone could do it at once.
I don't know how much commercial real estate costs, but in the region around Twitter's HQ it's about $5-$6k for a 1000 square foot apartment
Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile
But since the cost of building those offices will be reflected in this quarter's earnings and destroy some executive bonuses, while the benefits won't be reflected in earnings for at least a full quarter and possibly longer, building individual workspaces is impossible.
Yeah, but Silicon Valley tech companies are already pulling in $2M per employee per year.. if spending 0.5% of that on better offices increases that revenue by 10%, you can probably bet that they'll want to do it
Presumably the higher ups legitimately believe that the open office plans are better for the company, which fits with how insistent most of them are to get butts back in seats now despite almost everyone hating the commute and the office life
I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.
And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?
The fact is, it was only "100% remote" being forced into existence by the pandemic that is allowing us to even have the debate. Outside of tech almost nowhere allowed remote before.
Musk represents the old guard who liked making people suffer these horrible commutes and office environments just to make senior mgmt feel important.
As a result, I think it's important to defend 100% remote as a pro-employee position, and then look to optional onsite as a way to mitigate potential issues such as isolation, young folks with roomates etc.
I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies.
However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
During a keynote speech on May 10, Elon Musk commended Tesla factory workers in China for working under conditions that break labor laws in many parts of the world — including those in China, as The Guardian pointed out. The high praise from Elon went out to workers who are being pushed to meet production goals in the middle of pandemic lockdowns, which have been ongoing at the Gigafactory in Shanghai since April. The Tesla CEO went on to compare Chinese workers with their American counterparts, who Musk says lack work ethic he considers impressive and vital for EV companies to succeed.
"There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all."
Going by what Musk says, it sure sounds like what they say is true: nobody wants to work anymore. That is, except for workers in China, where conditions enabling Tesla to meet production goals during lockdowns have less to do with burning oil past midnight, and more to do with China’s extreme work culture. Meaning Musk isn’t really praising hardworking people so much as a disregard for labor rules.
During the lockdowns, workers at the Gigafactory reportedly worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week and slept on the floor. Again, that’s not only during recent lockdowns. This is actually common enough to be nicknamed “996.” That’s shorthand for work shifts going from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
Jerry Pournelle once wrote that "unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery." Seems like Musk and his ultra-libertarian ilk are heading down that same path.
If you knew anything about Pournelle (his books are good, especially his collaborations with Niven), you'd realize he'd be the last to espouse communism. This is someone who arguably came up with the SDI during the Reagan administration.
No, he's advocating for effective, efficient (and limited) government regulation.
I come from the soviet block and I like to see when westerners keep flagging my post for laughing out communist advocates ( they are growing as you see ). My country ( Poland ) was an example for this unregulated capitalism transformation in 90s and I can say, I am glad somebody has tried it. Regarding regulations please see mifid 2 regulation and see how efficient and concise it is ( tousands of pages ). So to all westerners please come to eastern Europe and see these "efficient regulations" - they never are
I don't see how you can so confidently connect labor issues in a Gigafactory to his beliefs surrounding the efficacy of remote work. You still have not addressed this part of your claim:
> He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager
You don't know why he's banning remote work, and you're guessing that its the most inflammatory reason you can come up with. You do not know.
We know he's banning remote work, and we know he's an authoritarian micromanager (because he brags about that). What is added to the conversation by quibbling over the precise causative relationship between those two facts?
Really, the idea that there isn't a connection is the less likely option. I think it's on you to prove that, not on others to disprove it. "When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras."
That doesn't make him immune from criticism or being described as authoritarian. A negative view on an employer may not have an immediate impact but medium to long term it can make hiring and retaining difficult, which can drive up costs.
Er no. There are both social and legal norms around employment. I’m not saying he’s breaking any laws here, but companies are a certain scale aren’t just the playthings of the boss they exist at the convenience and for the benefit for society at large (ie they are granted the privilege of being a company). That means there are constraints on corporate behaviour.
No, that's why we have labor laws. Being a billionaire doesn't make you a king.
Every company is spending "their own money" to pay employees. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand shareholders or just one. There is still a corporate structure and formal employee relationships. They are employees, not serfs, and they deserve the respect that entails.
Yes, I’m sure a narcissistic egomaniac would never condone or encourage such behaviour, and there’s no bootlicker out there who’d do it for brownie points. Completely unheard of.
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk may kind of be a jerk? Why do you have to deflect and find reasons to throw out evidence, especially when there are piles and piles of it?
Yeah, sure. Because society and culture does not change and evolve. It's standing still like its 1905 when predatory capitalism was all the rage and people was still angry for loosing all their literal slaves.
At this scale those are not just his "own" money otherwise we are going to have another Nero and Caligula moments again in the future.
Just because certain scummy behavior is legal doesn't make it ethical or a good business decision. Given what I have seen of his behavior I want absolutely nothing to do with Elon and his companies, either as a customer or employee, and am sure many others feel the same.
I assume this is a reference to the lawsuits accusing Tesla of racial discrimination, including calling an area staffed with Black workers "The Plantation"
First of all, that isn't the word that racist, slave-owning, plantation-owning population would use. If you are going to make a reference to our sad history in the United States of chattel slavery, use the accurate word. It doesn't do anyone a service to water down the absolute dehumanization the enslaved experienced at the hands of their "owners" (I quote that word to show disdain for the concept of humans owning humans, not to minimize the fact of ownership).
Secondly, you have some gall to compare a CEO setting policies that are well within the confines of labor laws with human slavery. Beyond the absurdity of your comparison, don't forget that Twitter employees literally have the right to walk away. That is the antithesis of slavery.
You are doing your own argument a massive disservice by making such absurd accusations. Instead of arguing on the merits of remote vs. in-person work, you invite an argument on your analogies. This is the same as calling anyone you disagree with politically a Nazi. Not only does it debase the absolute evil practiced by actual Nazis, it ends any chance of effective debate.
I didn't take the comment you are responding to in that way at all (comparing Musk's actions to that of a slave-owner). I believed the OP was reacting to the "it's Musk's money he can treat his employees as he likes" — by way of an analogy that you thought too extreme.
(To be sure, if OP had used the "N-word" I am quite sure there would be much more condemnation though that would have unfortunately then entirely missed the point.)
> I believed the OP was reacting to the "it's Musk's money he can treat his employees as he likes" — by way of an analogy that you thought too extreme.
That is exactly the problem. The analogy was that Musk akin to a plantation owner, and his prerogative vis-à-vis twitter employees (by virtue of being CEO, a position he gained through a takeover with his "money") is akin to the rights plantation owners practiced vis-à-vis slaves on the plantation. This is exactly what the person I replied to implied.
The problem I had was never with whether a CEO has a right to set policies like banning employees from remote work. The problem is that the analogy directly compared employees to slaves. The former have the right to walk away, the latter never did (without risking death). No matter what the antecedent is (CEOs vs. plantation owners) the subsequent is a false likeness (slave vs. employee).
And I agree that using the "n-word" would have probably been flagged immediately. And if it wasn't, it would be the focus of the comment and not the content. My argument is that functionally this is a distinction without a difference. Saying "Negros" may have insulated the poster from the immediate flagging, the thesis of their argument was equally as flawed independent of the words used. Elon Musk is not a slave-owner[1], Twitter employees are not slaves. No amount of hedging could make that analogy accurate.
[1]
Whether the Musk family benefited from de facto slavery within the emerald mining business is a different argument. One that should be discussed, but in the context of exploitation of labor in third-world countries. Furthermore, as others have pointed out in this thread, the treatment of workers in China building Tesla models could be more justifiably argued to be a form of modern-day slavery, as the worker has far less agency to actually quit and still survive. Neither of these points were mentioned in this specific thread, and neither would have much bearing on whether Twitter employees are akin to slaves.
HN is full of strong comments like this. A lot worse has been said about many tech people on here (Larry Ellison comes to mind).
Part of the cost of being a public figure and a multibillionaire is that people will talk about you without the same collegial tone that they'd use with their peers.
> In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.
My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United States then people in the highest markets would get significant drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than the average worker doing the same work over the same period of time.
Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I say it".
It's not like your income is scaled to the housing costs though. I just checked craigslist for Los angeles and Columbus, Ohio. 1 bedroom average in LA is $2000 and change, Columbus its $1000. For a year in the average 1 bedroom, you are only paying $12k more or so for the unit in LA. Other costs are about the same, the same MSRP for consumer goods, about the same grocery bill (certain food is honestly very cheap in LA due to its year round availability), about the same $10 pints of beers and $12 entrees at your typical late 20s and up drinking/eating establishment.
Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.
> Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest,
In northern CA this holds true and even moreso in Seattle. In southern california (notably because you mention Los Angeles), this is not true. There are high paying jobs in SoCal, but they are much scarcer than the talent pool. While there are more opportunities in SoCal than other parts of the west coast, they are lower paying and worse conditions overall that are closer to midwest counterparts. This view is borne of 40 years of experience in SoCal (and everyone I worked with). Moving to Seattle, I instantly made 30% more AND rent was cheaper.
FWIW average rents in seattle are about $1600 a month for 1 bedrooms on craigslist right now, so you'd only be saving $7200 a year living in Columbus Ohio. I know salary data online is what it is, but from zippia.com at least average SWE salary is $75k in Columbus, and $115k in seattle, so even with the cost of living difference of $7k factored in, there is a huge bump in pay for this job market of engineers versus the market in Columbus, OH.
Southern California and Seattle are greater metropolitan areas, that coincide with job markets (the job markets are the comparison I drew). You don't rent IN Seattle proper. That's silly, when Renton gets you 2br or Kent gets you 3br. It's like saying "Los Angeles" when your rental options are cheapest in Downy or Anaheim.
I live in the midwest, in a house that's appraised around $350K. Every time I visit family on the West coast, I look at similar house prices, and they're all at least 3x or 4x. No way could I afford that; and I sure wouldn't get a huge salary bump for relocating.
At the end of the day median prices of mortgages follow median salaries seen in the area, and not everyone who buys a west coast house goes broke from it otherwise prices would decrease. Maybe your line of work isn't so lucrative on the west coast, but for many the bump in salary is more than enough to cover cost of living. Then factor in other benefits that might be locally specific, like noncompetes being illegal in california so you can leave a business to start your own immediately, or your property taxes being what they were assessed at when you bought the property despite market gains, or a stronger social safety net that comes from a state government that generates budgetary surpluses, and things might look even better over time.
> I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D
I secretly agree with you. I think the ideal situation is to accommodate both sets of needs. Personally I prefer 100% remote but if someone wants hybrid then that's fine too.
I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate because I acknowledge that executives really would like everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself than do that.
I know most studies show remote work improves productivity. I have the opposite experience even though I need to take one hour to commute one way. Our office is 80% empty on average. I think this has greatly hurt the interaction between people, increased friction and slowed down project progress. I am sure some people are more efficient at home, but there might be a silent majority, who enjoy doing less work remotely and never voice themselves (or even say the opposite).
In most places it seems to be the opposite from what I gather from my clients. Small majority of people prefer to go into the office. Especially those with kids. And they are vocal about it.
I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home. However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.
Anything more than 0% office implies a huge sea change from 0%.
To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.
At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.
Rest of the world has largely gone back to office to work now, even if it is part time.
I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.
For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.
My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.
The problem with hybrid is you're still bound geographically. My work insists on being hybrid (my job has no reason for me to be in the office) and it increases my cost of living by at least 50%, not to mention I'll never be able to be a home owner.
I’m definitely at the point where I’m getting less productive from home, but the question is when is that drop in productivity offset by the time wasted commuting? If my office was just down the street I’d be there every day.
> I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective
Even if productivity was down at home vs at the office aren't we already way too productive anyways ?
Living in the office would also be more productive, and working 10 hours per day, banning weekends, &c.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're here to grind for 45 years to pay the lifestyle of eccentrics like Musk or to live life ? If it's ok to lose 10% of productivity while regaining hours of your life ?
This comment really strikes a chord with me. Some days, I’m way more productive, others not so much.
What I do love is eliminating the commute time. That is time I’ve been able to utilize in other ways that really contribute to my mental well being.
Walking the kids to school (instead of driving), walking the dog, exercise, catch up on chores or errands, etc.
That is probably my favorite aspect of working from home.
I do miss those serendipitous interactions with coworkers. And Zoom fatigue is real. (I’m just waiting for the day when Zoom alerts your manager that the Zoom window is not the active window on your machine)
Wouldn't you experience in-person meeting fatigue sooner than zoom fatigue? What is it about sitting in the comfort of your own home having a conversation that is worse than sitting in an office having a conversation?
A hundred and twenty people die every minute in the US. How far will you go to ensure that doesn't happen? How many civil liberties will you suspend, and how many cherished norms of life will you cast aside in your goal?
Reminder that "forever", "unlimited", "never", "always", and other superlatives, when spoken by companies, only mean the limit is not yet known, not yet coherently defined, or that the definition is provided elsewhere.
Illustrates a case where even workers who have a good relationship with their management might benefit from a union. Management can change; then who is left to hold the new management to former promises?
The one-sidedness of the comments in this thread surprise me.
If you want to work remotely, don’t work at Twitter.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it’s more beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people to work towards those goals.
Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To give my opinion, if I ran a business that I was trying to grow or trying to meet lofty goals, I’d probably have people in the office too. However, I see upsides to working from home too.
I’ve been working remotely since the beginning of COVID and currently work 2,000 miles away from my work.
Yeah, but most of the posts here aren't really critique, they're just sarcastic scorn. We get it, HN, you like remote work a lot and can't imagine any alternative.
I'm reading the same comments, and there seems to be a reasonable amount of thoughtful writing too. In addition, there are sarcastic/scornful comments in the other direction too, yours included ("We get it, HN, you like remote work a lot and can't imagine any alternative."). Try not to get focused on individual snarky comments, because doing that makes those comments a bigger part of the conversation.
I'd wager most of us can imagine alternatives because we lived alternatives. We've figured out a method that works better for us and don't want to go back to losing hours a week for what we expect will have negative value (lower productivity, happiness, etc).
Further, this edict is coming from someone that is presumable working remote now (for at least one company) and will continue to do so indefinitely. It's only natural to push back on that.
Agreed. I have been reading HN for a while, and the overwhelming tone here is definitely "screw the manager/CIO/CEO" together with "If I have to go into the office, I will quiet quit, quit without notice, sabotage my employer", etc. It is truly shocking.
I feel many on HN simply can't appreciate the great working conditions the IT industry has compared to other industries (health care, food service, social services, etc). Getting paid over $100K a year and crying about going to the office? Wow, just wow. Imagine how nurses feel getting much lower pay that are forced to go to work and deal with sick/unruly people...
> HN simply can't appreciate the great working conditions the IT industry has compared to other industries
These conditions don't happen by accident or by the goodwill of employers. They happen because people in the industry have such a hard attitude toward management. Stop pushing back and all these conditions will suddenly disappear.
Your example of nurses is a good one. In some countries they have excellent conditions. In other countries, they have very poor conditions. Their impact on society is the same everywhere, but different historical events have allowed them to have their current work experience.
I don't know where you work/worked before, but I've only had 1 "bad boss" in my +30yr IT career. Even that boss did not rise to the level of "bad bosses" constantly criticized here on HN. Most/all of my bosses have been extremely understanding about work-life balance, family commitments, teamwork, collaboration, etc. Seems I been very lucky compared to the vast number of HN comments.
> These conditions don't happen by accident or by the goodwill of employers. They happen because people in the industry have such a hard attitude toward management.
I call baloney on this. It always cracks me up how wrong people are about management’s attitude about them. Been in management at upper levels across multiple orgs, and not once have I ever heard discussions about “how we can screw our team”.
The takeaway is that nurses should get higher pay as compensation for being unable to not WFH. Not that everybody else should feel glad that they aren't getting screwed to the same extent.
All I know is that when you have within a few weeks nearly 15k+ former Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, and (name the next SV company to layoffs) folks entering the job market…if you are still employed, you might want to lay low for a while and count your blessings, because there is going to be a hundreds of impressive resumes for every open position in tech that comes open for the next 12-18 months.
Rage quitting would be really really stupid right now. You’ll end up replacing your cushy 6-figure tech gig with a lovely career slinging hash and eggs for minimum wage plus tips.
In an all-else-being-equal world, yes I can see the tradeoffs.
The problem is that Elon has already destroyed the trust that should’ve existed between him and his newfound employees. It shouldn’t be surprising that in such a relationship any managerial decisions are viewed with extreme skepticism towards their motivation.
Not to mention all of the text messages we’ve already seen that already explain the motivation behind this move. Those were just one of the things that destroyed the trust.
Taking the benefit away from employees currently exercising it (with zero grace period) is a little different than someone joining a company knowing they don't do remote work from the start.
I'm not saying it makes Elon Musk a bad person (I think he's a bad person for plenty of other reasons), but I do think it's a poorly thought out move on his part that will cause some of the better employees that survived the layoffs to quit.
It is my understanding that Twitter has been extremely friendly towards remote work.
Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman cruelty without empathy. I’m not even taking any kind of legal perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to employee’s lives can be enormous.
I’m so happy to live in a country where this would be quite illegal to do.
I love working remotely, I definitely feel like I am more productive and pretty much all of my colleagues feel the same way. Perhaps individually, we all are more productive. However, that said…as a team we are simply not as productive as we were prior to the pandemic. No one wants to acknowledge it, but it’s true. I suspect we are not the only ones.
At some point someone in a decision making role is going to see it too, and at that time we will all be disappointed.
Not allowing remote work is still allowed, but I don’t think it’s far away from being socially unacceptable. Being legally unacceptable is just one step beyond that.
No need to buy the company, anyone can always start a new one, it's very affordable, just a few hundred bucks. Then you can set whatever rules you want for yourself and your employees.
So what do you suggest? Them have the pay, and also set the rules? What else do you suggest? Work on the things they want, and not on what they are told?
Whatever you tell about the fact that it is employees are actually the ones who make twitter work, they aren't there the only ones on the planet who can do this job. If current employees don't want to work from office, then, maybe, some others might be willing.
Like all monopolies and cartels, they do far more harm than good. If Twitter workers unionized, I'd suggest firing them all and hired new ones. Maybe in a country where unions are prohibited.
Unions aren't monopolies they are collective bargaining. The monopoly on power you are advocating is for a single owner of a company to set all the rules.
So you do view Twitter as a car, which can have an owner. What are the employees then in your scenario?
Musk offers no value to Twitter having purchased it, the value lies in the people working on it.
"Other times, two Tesla employees told CNBC, Tesla workers are pressured to help with projects at his other companies for no additional pay because it’s good for their careers, or because the work is seen as helping with a related party transaction or project."
That is basically the opposite. Being ordered by your boss to go pull an all-nighter at his other company for no additional pay, as opposed to voluntarily taking an additional job along with the associated salary because you were bored and felt like it.
He is simply doing what he believes is in the shareholders' best interests.
If you bought a company, especially a failing company, it wouldn't be business as usual: you would immediately set policies that make the most sense for your shareholders and increase profits.
And, Musk has a reputation to be a very hard 24x7 worker but also one not bound by a timezone, let alone geographic location, but again it's a lot easier for him to note dedication etc based on who actually shows up to work. This might be an undeserved reputation, but he is clearly "on" texting and tweeting at all hours day-and-night, and he's running multiple successful companies simultaneously, so either he's awesome at delegation or he's working very hard (or both).
(of course, he has other shareholders, but he is clearly the majority shareholder and the one who is completely in control of the board, and thus has the greatest legal responsibility to keep twitter solvent and return value to himself and the other investors.)
Twitter doesn't have shareholders. But Tesla and SpaceX does.
And not sure how happy they are with Musk and employees not being fully committed to adding value to their investments. Especially given that both companies have serious competition that is increasingly in quality and aggressiveness as each day passes.
On a sidenote, any manager who measures dedication by number of physical hours at the office is either inexperienced or incompetent.
All private corporations in the U.S. have shareholders. (LLC's have members, which are similar.)
The executive team and board of those private corporations have a fiduciary duty to the corporation that they will take actions to increase their investment.
Twitter has at least one major shareholder, Elon Musk, which is why I jokingly wrote "the shareholder" singularly. He also seems to have other institutional shareholders, but it's unclear if he just personally owes the money or if they have taken a collateral interest in Twitter itself. (The latter seems more likely)
Thus, Elon Musk has a fiduciary obligation to his shareholder(s), even if it was just him (it's not).
Like it or not, he is taking steps to reduce the drag on Twitter's finances because he doesn't have a lot of choice.
After burning hundreds of millions of dollars for years, he's got to cut the fat quickly or the company will become insolvent.
Executives at tech companies tend to live very different lives from the people doing the work. Exceptionalism is typically baked into their understanding of the world.
Strangely enough I think this is the first objectively bad decision he has made since owning Twitter. The others are questionable for sure but this is a good way to lose your best engineers to companies that will respect them.
I think blindly firing employees with low code counts is an objectively bad decision that ignores a lot of nuance and likely lost a lot of great engineers to companies that will respect them.
The idea that all lines of code are equal (in difficulty) is so absurd as to (in my memory) have been never discussed on HN before. Everyone here knows it. How could Elon not?
I don't think the intention is to suspend ElonJet since Musk has already explicitly said he made the choice to not suspend it despite the alleged "personal safety risk". Trolls in this case probably refers to accounts that paid for new Twitter Blue and are now impersonating well-known figures/entities.
The wording seems consistent with everything going on at Twitter so far, that he's just kinda winging it while everyone else is frozen in confusion over the abrupt changes. A $44B acquisition is quickly reverting into the volatility of a 2006 startup.
These are amusing to look at, but for Twitter to be taken seriously long term this can't keep happening. Musk's $8 Twitter Blue change is what unleashed this chaos in the first place.
You think this matters? Did you not see the whole "comedy is legal again" followed by banning/suspending people for parodies? How quickly he went back on "free speech"?
Really tearing off the mask there. Another point into the "free speech until I don't like it" column.
Not to mention not understanding what parody and satire are, of course. To this day there are people who still think Sarah Palin actually said "I can see Russia from my house!" but that doesn't make it not satire.
It's called parody, and you can't actually seriously be asking, can you? You probably thought that The Onion amici brief on parody was good! Yet here you are, insisting that if parody doesn't reveal itself, it's identity theft and impersonation. Never heard of a comedian that "does impressions"? Doing an impression isn't illegal. Mimicking someone except as to say things they'd obviously not say, is exactly what parody is and it's not illegal and it's certainly not problem speech in anyway (as opposed to spam, which makes sites illegible/unusable).
Is creating a false “Musk” account to spam people with some shitcoin “parody”? Is creating a fake Musk account to post hatefull shit under his name “parody”?
What is up with the New Left and this total absence of reason and ethics?
Actual parody is completely okay and NOT banned (unlike it was on Old Twitter).
>Is creating a false “Musk” account to spam people with some shitcoin “parody”? Is creating a fake Musk account to post hatefull shit under his name “parody”?
No, and yes. I'm not sure what's difficult to navigate about that? the first might even be commercial speech.
>"What is up with the New Left and this total absence of reason and ethics?"
I don't know? You tell me? Who is the new left? What do they have to do with this conversation at all?
>Actual parody is completely okay and NOT banned (unlike it was on Old Twitter).
There is no category of parody that is "actual parody". There is just parody, and not parody. The examples I provided were all parody that is now again banned... In your example, posting hateful shit as musk is parodic and is banned.
It probably is, but it's kind of risky if you end up pissing off employees who are key to your operations and top performers. Those folks can easily find work elsewhere. You end up with the people who can't easily move elsewhere.
Probably. But you might not want to work at a place where this is at the whim of a manager. Or where your non rock star colleagues are treated like shit.
Does Musk value developers? Considering his "code review" the first week, and how poorly FSD at Tesla functions, (I know it's an extremely difficult, if not insurmountable problem) I think he has a very simplistic idea of how to both evaluate and motivate developers.
At this point we have enough evidence to conclude that absolutely nothing Musk does is a "calculated move". If this drives people to quit it's merely a fringe benefit (benefit strictly from Musk's perspective) - this is his normal impulsive micromanaging controlling self.
Unlikely. A more calculated move would be to first remove remote work, then reduce headcount to the level you want. The other way not only are they paying larger severance, but also aren't sure what number of people they end up with and what teams will disappear completely.
This can’t not result in some hidden maintenance or security problems.
Half of the people left and the other half has been told to brace for difficult times, it doesn’t sound like good conditions for smooth continuous operation.
Whatsapp had 1B users with far fewer eng, why is Twitter so big?
Here is my back of the envelope math of how big I think the company should be for their main offering.
Over the past years Twitter has acquired a ton of companies, but I'm going to leave them out of this equation.
In all seriousness, I think many of us are falling into the trap that the PayPal guy fell into. Twitter isn't just the app and the website. So it's much harder to run and maintain than it seems like from the outside. If it was just the Tweets, why would they ever need more than 10 iOS developers for instance?
If we cut Twitter into what it is on the surface, and perhaps lose some data retention, then sliming down the engineering organization significantly should be possible with the right people. Not to 50, that's really low for a platform the size of Twitter. That being said: 7500 employees is also way to many for what they do, or at least for how little money they make.
Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company. The only reason it went through is thanks to a long line of court rulings starting with Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. that prioritized shareholder interest over every other stakeholders. You can't expect to practically traumatize a company's culture like this and expect all the "right people" to still stay here and give their 100%.
So that was meant as a joke, probably should have left that out.
>Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company
Technically I believe he was forced to buy in the end, but no. You're right, no one asked him to do anything. The shareholders saw an out. They had a failed company on their hands and now the PayPal guy shows up and stupidly promises to buy the whole thing for way more than it's actually worth. Of cause they are going to dump the stock on the idiot, by (legal)forced if they had to. Now it's Musks problem. He has zero ideals when it comes to Twitter culture. He doesn't care. All he currently see is 7500 people who needs a paycheck, paid by him. He stupidly thought he could run Twitter successfully, like most of us HN backseat drivers. When he realized that he can't it was to late and now he stuck and have to either save the company or at least not lose to much more money.
I have to admit if I was an executive and I watched one of those "day in the life of" tiktoks from twitter employees that show them spending maybe 20% of their day doing work and the other 80% enjoying company amenities I might be considering tightening things up as well.
'20% of the day doing work and 80% enjoying company amenities' is ridiculous hyperbole. even if a hypothetical employee is doing that, putting them in the office clearly isn't enough to fix it since they supposedly put a tiktok video up saying 'i don't do my job' and they weren't fired
If we were watching the same videos, they showed themselves getting lunch, getting coffee, going to the gym, and hanging out on the roof. None of these videos suggested that these activities totaled anywhere close to 6 hours in a day.
Wait, so you have an employee that can get all their work done using 20% of their working hours and then spend the rest of their day ensuring they don't burn out and you want to become adversarial to that employee?
Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate issue from the video itself.
It's like that quote from The Office where Michael says Jim is a lazy worker because it takes Jim 20 minutes to complete a project that would take Michael hours to complete. Seems like you're saying you want your least efficient employees and can't be bothered to understand the working habits of your most efficient employees.
Or maybe, just maybe, using time as a sole metric isn't the best way to evaluate employee effectiveness or efficiency.
B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are therefore meaningless.
C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.
My hunch is that its a combination of these two.
I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.
I am not missing those options at all. It's just that the video is not the issue nor the way time can be spent at the company. If your metrics for evaluating performance is wrong that should be addressed before becoming adversarial to your employees based on a flawed perception.
And if there isn't enough work to justify a FTE, then again your metrics are bad. The forecast was not accurate enough. And the only way to know if that's true or not is to fix the formula, do the math again, and figure out the truth.
In both scenarios the employee isn't necessarily the problem, or even a problem at all.
And if we take a step back and evaluate the source material, it's a TikTok video. It's meant to be content. Do we even know if the employee is really only working 20% of the time? We aren't getting a 16 hour live stream here, it's short form content. The truth of the matter is heavily obscured.
It just seems like a bad idea to me to base you're business decisions around a TikTok video, especially when it's one that is adversarial to your employees. Instead, spend the time to understand the reality. Like we might find that the employee is actually working 90% of their workday. And then suddenly you're making decisions that never need to be made in the first place.
> I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.
Depends heavily on function. Plenty of roles are somewhat peaks and valleys of backlogged work. There might be times where some employees really can get their work done using 20% of their day, but then at a different stage they would need to use way more than 20%.
Yeah, I’m not a twitter exec but presumably would be making decisions off of more than just a TikTok video. I don’t think any of your argument is counter to mine.
It doesn’t take a genius to observe that there may be some fat to cut.
I mean I agree, there is probably fat to cut. But the premise was that if you were an exec and saw that video you'd then consider tightening up the amenities. And if you're basing that decision on a TikTok video that seems a bit short sighted to me.
If you're tightening up the available amenities that should be based on totally different data that has nothing to do with a social media post.
This is just more straw-manning. The video either leaves an impression on you or it doesn't. It's really not possible to have a meaningful argument about the actions inferred from an ambiguous statement like "I might be considering tightening things up".
The video struck me as particularly brash given the current economic climate.
The job climate is such, with lots of SV layoffs, that this requirement will probably work now where it wouldn't have worked six months ago (engs would have jumped from Twitter to another SV co)
A lot of Twitter employees live nowhere near SV, or even an office. The only way to interpret this is that Musk either wants to force more people to leave, or doesn't realize that they're going to leave as a result of this move.
This kinda thing is great for the "remote work at all hours" is the erzats demon keeping software companies alive. If it is, we'll likely see some downtime, lots of typical E company results (burned out software folks, higher turnover than is industry standard, and much lower pay since Elon doesn't negotiate at silicon valley salary expectations at any of his companies...
If in 2 years Twitter isn't significantly smaller (think 1500 people) and significantly cheaper to run I'd be surprised.
If in 2 years twitter isn't the worst place to work in the valley I'd also be surprised.
Twitter is going to not exist in 2 years. The financials make no sense, and we already have influencers making fun of subscribers. Subscribing is not only going to create a dichotomy that drives away "economy-of-scale" users but it's going to quickly gain a reputation of being "lame."
Here's a cool and perhaps unforeseen hypothetical turn-of-events: 100% of Twitter's staff give their resignation letter on Friday, and don't show up to work. Leadership wakes up to a collapsing platform, a 44 billion USD bill to pay, with no one to keep the lights on or answer the PagerDuty alerts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team members". You just wake up to learn everybody left and you're left with nothing.
Half of them were already fired (more will probably follow), and the rest will be messed with for months (if not years) to come (as is evident by the email being discussed here). Having nothing to lose...
370k software engineer jobs listed on linkedin right now. So each person laid off from these companies gets to choose between 10 open roles at other companies. And that's just what's listed on linkedin; most jobs aren't.
There aren't 370k jobs paying FAANG or near-FAANG compensation and benefits. Probably about 10% of that is paying anywhere near what Twitter employees are used to getting.
I'm making close to the low end of an entry level software engineer at Twitter according to levels.fyi, and I'm making above average for senior software engineers in my region, based on recruiter/job posting salary ranges and posted salaries on these websites. Haven't gotten a regional recruiter offering anything competitive in the past year since I started this job.
Also the unlisted jobs paying anywhere near Twitter level compensation is probably close to 0%, so no need to add them to the mix.
Sounds like something i would love to do. Musk, the peepole farmer, would be in for a treat. But those who wish to fill in their social voids with onsite work wouldn't be game.
Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?
I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications.
Just a thought, I don't really have an opinion here, Twitter is pretty "meh" in my view. I of course hope it ends well for the employees!
Are there any restrictions on timing your quitting so that it damages your employer as much as possible?
Like, I don't know, a senior sale person quitting 2 minutes into a meeting to sign a massive contract, the company lawyer quitting 5 minutes before representing the company in a trial, or somesuch.
No. Off the top of my head, my understanding is that the vast majority of full time jobs in the US are at-will employment which means there is no required notice period. It’s considered a best practice to give two weeks or more but that’s a social contract and not enforceable in any way. In the past, when employee reference checks were a real thing, that two weeks might buy you a better reference, but even that has been stripped away now with references handled by HR and only confirming dates of employment and conditions of termination (this is to avoid lawsuits I think).
According to this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo... a twitter lawyer has told employees that their contracts specify they are a remote first workplace, so it's unclear if Elon has the actual right to force anyone to return to the office.
In at-will states like California he doesn't really need the "right" to fire anyone (assuming he isn't firing them for any protected class reasons). I doubt the majority of Twitter employees (in the US anyway) have any sort of individual employment contract which specifies anything different than the typical at-will employment.
I suspect though that if he does fire people for refusing to return to the office that given the circumstances (twitter very openly being a 'remote first' workplace for years) that states would view that as a constructive dismissal and at the very least those fired would be eligible for unemployment benefits despite being fired "for cause".
California is an 'at-will' work state, which means you can both be fired at-will or you can leave a company at-will with zero notice (it goes both ways).
I know, because I've done it (left, that is, with only notice given the day-of). Unless this has changed in the years since I've left CA/the US.
> Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?
No. The vast majority of tech jobs are “at-will” on both sides: either party can terminate the relationship at any moment.
Born with an emerald spoon in his mouth, it's no surprise that Musk has no empathy with the common worker.
On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.
Ah yes. Little is known about apartheid-era SA but the one thing we all know is that when you were fired, they paid you for 2 months and provided healthcare.
why would anyone want to work for this asshole? It's not like the employees are well paid compared to other companies. If I wanted to get fisted, I'd just go to amazon and get a bigger check for it
Updated to "work-from-anywhere in the building" now. With half of the staff gone you can claim any empty desk or office in sight, I hear the CISO and chief compliance officer's spots are open!
In the US at least, even if you're categorized as remote, the company can almost certainly pull you back to an office and fire you if you won’t. It probably wouldn't be considered as "for cause" (IANAL) but a company can pretty much unilaterally change work conditions, responsibilities, etc. so long as no labor laws are violated.
Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in another place or made life decisions based on this policy which is likely a lot of people. This is really showing that you don’t respect or care about your employees which is par for the course for musk. However i think what he is forgetting is that Twitter isn’t some amazing challenge to solve like self driving or rockets. I think you will see a very understaffed twitter in the future.
I could imagine putting up with a lot of shit from Elon if I believed I was building a better future for humanity in the process, but it's hard to see how a social network is accomplishing that
Yep you get away with a lot of shitty leadership and tough conditions if you can get everyone to buy in to the mission. Hard to see how you could convince anyone that twitter is worth fighting for now.
Yeah that is the real question. If musk can sell this to the employees and turn twitter into a tesla/spacex culture i would honestly never bet against him again. I would also be curious to read about how he was able to do that.
Sure everything has a risk. I have a remote contract currently that they could decide they want a centralized office and will let me go if I don’t move. That risk should be seen as fairly low when the C suit has committed to it and if it does change it sucks. I would still feel bad for those people.
Im not sure if you are trying to say that because risk is involved we shouldn’t empathize?
> Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in another place or made life decisions based on this policy which is likely a lot of people.
I don't. The usual recommendation for buying a house is if you're going to stay there for 5+ years. Job hopping in the valley every 3 years is pretty common. Committing to the remote work lifestyle with an expensive home when it's not clear how long WFH will be an option is a risky move.
> Committing to the remote work lifestyle with an expensive home when it's not clear how long WFH will be an option is a risky move.
I mean buying a house based on a program labeled “permanent” seems pretty low risk to me (especially if you’re in a position making a salary where you can buy a house).
Who could predict that a billionaire would decide to piss in their own cereal and fuck up that plan in the process?
You don’t have to be in a bad position for this to become a stressful situation. A little empathy goes a long way. Im sure most of the engineers will be fine however even if you have money in the bank and are fine for years without a job the sudden shock of being thrown into a crap economic environment or being forced to move isn’t fun.
My dad was in the military and I didn’t have a choice but to move every few years when i was growing up. Even with a guaranteed job it’s an extremely stressful situation for a family to be put in.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 645 ms ] thread> certainly pushed our tech boundaries into near science fiction
That bit seems a bit of an exaggeration to me.
- Boeing laughed at SpaceX and their proposed rocket re-use and cheap(er) space flight. Now Boeing is the no.3 supplier to NASA, SpaceX at 2 and playing catch up.
- Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)
- No other US company has announced humanoid robots aside from Boston Dynamics, which are not for the general public.
- Tesla has pushed for secondary industries such battery invovation and solar roof tiles (not regular panels on roofs). This in itself is not new but is a future green environment goal.
- The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
- How many non governmental industries can offer Ukraine help with something like Starlink? Can't be many... (honestly don't know but initially seems altruistic).
Tesla was founded in 2003, and self driving wasn't a thing to think about back then.
DARPA had been working on getting the research for it underway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2004) -- and that was announced in 2002.
I'd suggest a read of https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-grand-urban-challenge-self... to get a bit of perspective on it. Also look at the number of teams that were trying to do it back then and presumably had thought about it and done some preliminary work on it even before ( https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/11/08/107226/in-the-19... ).
This isn't "before Tesla, no one was doing it" it is much more a "until recently, the necessary processing power was impractical to have in a car."
It's worth noting that what they're pushing is not tunneling technology but a particular mass transit system that is essentially a repackaging of personal rapid transit (PRT). Although, unlike the PRT system constructed 50 years ago and every other PRT system built since, Musk's version requires human drivers (as it relies on unmodified Tesla vehicles which are not self-driving).
A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140 characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run on my 4 year old desktop.
Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the bet Musk is making too.
Twitter isn't Netflix.
1. http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
Of course things have changed, money will do that.
If we get a general tech correction as part of this downturn things are going to be very different for companies that have been burning money for years.
If this keeps up the only way Twitter is going to be able to attract talent IMO is by offering massive comp packages, because that's the only way you're going to get people that aren't die hard Twitter/Elon Musk fans to want to come there.
Given the direction in which their advertising revenue is going, they might get there.
A lofty ambition indeed. Getting $5billion out of twitter users or an anual subscription of $15 out of 100% of the users sounds like hard work. However, if you drop the avertising revenue to $350 million you can do the WhatsApp $1 a year model.
On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving towards the future.
On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force his employees to work under his total control. He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.
Offshoring everything to the third world makes perfect sense to the old school factory owner too.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33544756
This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0] so interesting.
From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:
> "2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"
So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly driving this.
As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in quite the same way when public) and then going public again once this restructuring process has been completed.
[0] https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/
The only way this would make sense as a downsizing tactic would be if you believe that employees that prefer to work remote (enough to the point where they would consider quitting) are significantly worse than the average Twitter employee.
Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.
Law of unintended consequences and all that.
That is because he actually can force them to be under his control.
> He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralized offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralized offices.
I don't think he cares about their lives. Meanwhile, long hours in office have multiple advantages for controlling CEO like Musk. The people are removed from outside influences (friends, family, time to read) and closed in his own echo chamber. Whatever he wants to normalize, it will be harder for them to see is not normal outside of that bubble. It is another variant on what cults, monasteries, armies etc do ... the more they isolate you from outside influences, the better you surrender own agency.
Plus, people not comfortable with above self exclude. It is win win win for ceo. Not necessary effective, but produces strong loyalty and obeisance. Which has advantages also for productivity.
Will he be able to compete? I dont know. Musk twitter moves seem incompetent overall to me. But so far, his charizma and money (to certain people) did allowed him to get quite far in his previous companies. He did treated his previous employees pretty much the same way.
I dont understand why he wanted twitter and I think the incompetence is in the way he pursued the deal, but once one is saddled with such a problem the steps to get out from under it (or at least minimize the damage) are clear. forcing employees out is necessary.
> you can also see that these moves are for survival
They don't seem like moves of survival. They seem impulsive, emotional and causing him damage.
> forcing employees out is necessary
He just had layoff. Literally, it is not like he would need to send midnight eamils about going back to office tomorrow to make them go.
The thing I read that made the most sense is that he never wanted it. He wanted to use the buyout as cover for selling a bunch of Tesla stock. No due diligence was done because he fully expected to just back out of the deal, but that didn't happen because he and his billionaire buddies were not so happy about getting deposed and dragging all their dirty laundry into the public.
Let's break this down:
> He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support.
Calling someone a capitalist isn't the dig you think it is, especially on a website run by a VC firm.
Musk has a track record for returning profit to investors.
> That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Calling someone the boogeyman convinces nobody. What exactly are you warning about?
> He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.
Have you heard of Tesla EVs?
Have you heard that didn't invent them or even start the company or even cofound it?
Anyways, yes, he has done a lot of good and is actually smart. But it has also gone to his head and the more power and wealth he accrues the more it shows. Like with most people.
Mindlessly bashing him is just as much of a waste of time as mindlessly sucking his knob.
It is all sooo boooooring.
I would suggest going to the source rather than writing Reddit level comments.
He didn't actually found Paypal or SpaceX either.
It is not a largely-single-occupant two-and-a-half-ton electric sedan.
Well, it's his (and your) right to be wrong but that's a belief that was already on very shaky ground before 2020 and has by this point been absolutely proven wrong.
Unless your job actually requires physical interaction with or proximity to a thing or other people it can almost certainly be done equally well remotely.
Processes may have to be adjusted to account for remote workers and even the way people work when working remotely, but almost 100% of jobs that take place at a desk in front of a computer can and should be allowed to be remote.
The biggest thing that doesn't work in a remote environment is micromanagement, so bad bosses who feel the need to micromanage hate it, but those people are terrible so if they don't like it that's a good thing.
Not all problems require new or genuinely creative solutions either. And it seems really difficult to try and measure the creative output by individual contributors at any given company. You have no way of gleaning the micro decisions or solutions that people come up with for their internal issues. So this doesn't seem like one could "easily argue" this point at all, in fact it seems quite difficult.
Are you suggesting that product offerings are less creative as a whole? And if so, again what metric are you using to arrive at this conclusion? And are there really no trends of this same metric before 2020?
Unless you really desperately wanted to be in the presence of the man himself, and maybe thought he was going to buy you a horse in exchange for something
I'm sure many twitter employees thought he would drag his feet or the deal would fall through, and they'd have at least a year+ of time before he comes in.
Actually I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d be happy people got let go. (Even I felt kinda bad when “annoying talk politics everyday real loud for at least 30 minutes while everyone is working hard guy” got let go)..
They do work as toilet paper though.
I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels happy. That's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.
The downsides of an open floor plan can be at least partially countered by headphones, but there's much less that you can do on an individual level to make up for having that much of your personal time locked up in pure transit.
Reasonably, one company could give everyone an office but there’s no way everyone could do it at once.
Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile
You are talking about increasing the per capita headcount sixfold from 16 sq ft to 100. That’s going to have a significant effect on real estate cost.
Presumably the higher ups legitimately believe that the open office plans are better for the company, which fits with how insistent most of them are to get butts back in seats now despite almost everyone hating the commute and the office life
I also can only assume that it plays a role in office real-estate costs too, just like it does on housing costs.
I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.
And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?
And all the evidence agrees. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-unintended-consequences...
Musk represents the old guard who liked making people suffer these horrible commutes and office environments just to make senior mgmt feel important.
As a result, I think it's important to defend 100% remote as a pro-employee position, and then look to optional onsite as a way to mitigate potential issues such as isolation, young folks with roomates etc.
However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
During a keynote speech on May 10, Elon Musk commended Tesla factory workers in China for working under conditions that break labor laws in many parts of the world — including those in China, as The Guardian pointed out. The high praise from Elon went out to workers who are being pushed to meet production goals in the middle of pandemic lockdowns, which have been ongoing at the Gigafactory in Shanghai since April. The Tesla CEO went on to compare Chinese workers with their American counterparts, who Musk says lack work ethic he considers impressive and vital for EV companies to succeed.
"There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all."
Going by what Musk says, it sure sounds like what they say is true: nobody wants to work anymore. That is, except for workers in China, where conditions enabling Tesla to meet production goals during lockdowns have less to do with burning oil past midnight, and more to do with China’s extreme work culture. Meaning Musk isn’t really praising hardworking people so much as a disregard for labor rules.
During the lockdowns, workers at the Gigafactory reportedly worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week and slept on the floor. Again, that’s not only during recent lockdowns. This is actually common enough to be nicknamed “996.” That’s shorthand for work shifts going from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
No, he's advocating for effective, efficient (and limited) government regulation.
> He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager
You don't know why he's banning remote work, and you're guessing that its the most inflammatory reason you can come up with. You do not know.
Really, the idea that there isn't a connection is the less likely option. I think it's on you to prove that, not on others to disprove it. "When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras."
from page 21 of https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-t...
Beyond that, all behavior is not reasonable just because it's done with ones own money.
Every company is spending "their own money" to pay employees. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand shareholders or just one. There is still a corporate structure and formal employee relationships. They are employees, not serfs, and they deserve the respect that entails.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employees-reveal-most-...
A former production employee who worked at the company over 10 years ago said he was surprised by his coworkers' attitude toward Musk.
"When he walked by, people would bow down to him," the former employee said. "That was kind of surprising to me."
If you're claiming his paying them out-of-pocket, can you provide a citation?
If it is the former it is really uncalled for and downplays the struggle of African Americans in the United States.
(Work at home, used to work in an awful office, still nowhere near slavery)
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Secondly, you have some gall to compare a CEO setting policies that are well within the confines of labor laws with human slavery. Beyond the absurdity of your comparison, don't forget that Twitter employees literally have the right to walk away. That is the antithesis of slavery.
You are doing your own argument a massive disservice by making such absurd accusations. Instead of arguing on the merits of remote vs. in-person work, you invite an argument on your analogies. This is the same as calling anyone you disagree with politically a Nazi. Not only does it debase the absolute evil practiced by actual Nazis, it ends any chance of effective debate.
Be better than that, please.
(To be sure, if OP had used the "N-word" I am quite sure there would be much more condemnation though that would have unfortunately then entirely missed the point.)
That is exactly the problem. The analogy was that Musk akin to a plantation owner, and his prerogative vis-à-vis twitter employees (by virtue of being CEO, a position he gained through a takeover with his "money") is akin to the rights plantation owners practiced vis-à-vis slaves on the plantation. This is exactly what the person I replied to implied.
The problem I had was never with whether a CEO has a right to set policies like banning employees from remote work. The problem is that the analogy directly compared employees to slaves. The former have the right to walk away, the latter never did (without risking death). No matter what the antecedent is (CEOs vs. plantation owners) the subsequent is a false likeness (slave vs. employee).
And I agree that using the "n-word" would have probably been flagged immediately. And if it wasn't, it would be the focus of the comment and not the content. My argument is that functionally this is a distinction without a difference. Saying "Negros" may have insulated the poster from the immediate flagging, the thesis of their argument was equally as flawed independent of the words used. Elon Musk is not a slave-owner[1], Twitter employees are not slaves. No amount of hedging could make that analogy accurate.
[1] Whether the Musk family benefited from de facto slavery within the emerald mining business is a different argument. One that should be discussed, but in the context of exploitation of labor in third-world countries. Furthermore, as others have pointed out in this thread, the treatment of workers in China building Tesla models could be more justifiably argued to be a form of modern-day slavery, as the worker has far less agency to actually quit and still survive. Neither of these points were mentioned in this specific thread, and neither would have much bearing on whether Twitter employees are akin to slaves.
Part of the cost of being a public figure and a multibillionaire is that people will talk about you without the same collegial tone that they'd use with their peers.
Someone else has helpfully transcribed it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552970
The official document is here, see page 21 for the transcribed conversation, see plenty of other pages for his callous thought process: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-t...
Also, I think a review of this site’s guidelines is called for:
> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
> He calls himself a "nano-manager".
source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-pioneer-elon-musk-...
> In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-extreme-...
> Elon Musk says remote workers are just pretending to work.
source: https://fortune.com/2022/07/20/elon-musk-remote-work-from-ho...
Hehe, I wonder how does he think how 100% remote companies continue to work and excel.
Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I say it".
Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.
In northern CA this holds true and even moreso in Seattle. In southern california (notably because you mention Los Angeles), this is not true. There are high paying jobs in SoCal, but they are much scarcer than the talent pool. While there are more opportunities in SoCal than other parts of the west coast, they are lower paying and worse conditions overall that are closer to midwest counterparts. This view is borne of 40 years of experience in SoCal (and everyone I worked with). Moving to Seattle, I instantly made 30% more AND rent was cheaper.
Highest impact is mid project. You know, to make it hurt.
I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D
I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate because I acknowledge that executives really would like everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself than do that.
I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home. However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.
To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.
At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.
I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.
For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.
My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.
Even if productivity was down at home vs at the office aren't we already way too productive anyways ?
Living in the office would also be more productive, and working 10 hours per day, banning weekends, &c.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're here to grind for 45 years to pay the lifestyle of eccentrics like Musk or to live life ? If it's ok to lose 10% of productivity while regaining hours of your life ?
What I do love is eliminating the commute time. That is time I’ve been able to utilize in other ways that really contribute to my mental well being.
Walking the kids to school (instead of driving), walking the dog, exercise, catch up on chores or errands, etc.
That is probably my favorite aspect of working from home.
I do miss those serendipitous interactions with coworkers. And Zoom fatigue is real. (I’m just waiting for the day when Zoom alerts your manager that the Zoom window is not the active window on your machine)
Wouldn't you experience in-person meeting fatigue sooner than zoom fatigue? What is it about sitting in the comfort of your own home having a conversation that is worse than sitting in an office having a conversation?
Genius /s
Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647
Forever is a long time...
If you want to work remotely, don’t work at Twitter.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it’s more beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people to work towards those goals.
Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To give my opinion, if I ran a business that I was trying to grow or trying to meet lofty goals, I’d probably have people in the office too. However, I see upsides to working from home too.
I’ve been working remotely since the beginning of COVID and currently work 2,000 miles away from my work.
Further, this edict is coming from someone that is presumable working remote now (for at least one company) and will continue to do so indefinitely. It's only natural to push back on that.
I feel many on HN simply can't appreciate the great working conditions the IT industry has compared to other industries (health care, food service, social services, etc). Getting paid over $100K a year and crying about going to the office? Wow, just wow. Imagine how nurses feel getting much lower pay that are forced to go to work and deal with sick/unruly people...
These conditions don't happen by accident or by the goodwill of employers. They happen because people in the industry have such a hard attitude toward management. Stop pushing back and all these conditions will suddenly disappear.
Your example of nurses is a good one. In some countries they have excellent conditions. In other countries, they have very poor conditions. Their impact on society is the same everywhere, but different historical events have allowed them to have their current work experience.
I call baloney on this. It always cracks me up how wrong people are about management’s attitude about them. Been in management at upper levels across multiple orgs, and not once have I ever heard discussions about “how we can screw our team”.
Rage quitting would be really really stupid right now. You’ll end up replacing your cushy 6-figure tech gig with a lovely career slinging hash and eggs for minimum wage plus tips.
I'm happy to judge the critiques of that as "fair", and the changes themselves as "irresponsibly implemented".
Ending remote work? Whatever. I disagree, but it's his business.
Ending remote work with 3 hours notice? He's an asshole.
The problem is that Elon has already destroyed the trust that should’ve existed between him and his newfound employees. It shouldn’t be surprising that in such a relationship any managerial decisions are viewed with extreme skepticism towards their motivation.
Not to mention all of the text messages we’ve already seen that already explain the motivation behind this move. Those were just one of the things that destroyed the trust.
I'm not saying it makes Elon Musk a bad person (I think he's a bad person for plenty of other reasons), but I do think it's a poorly thought out move on his part that will cause some of the better employees that survived the layoffs to quit.
Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman cruelty without empathy. I’m not even taking any kind of legal perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to employee’s lives can be enormous.
I’m so happy to live in a country where this would be quite illegal to do.
At some point someone in a decision making role is going to see it too, and at that time we will all be disappointed.
Not allowing remote work is still allowed, but I don’t think it’s far away from being socially unacceptable. Being legally unacceptable is just one step beyond that.
This is more of a "if you don't like it, buy the company" situation.
Whatever you tell about the fact that it is employees are actually the ones who make twitter work, they aren't there the only ones on the planet who can do this job. If current employees don't want to work from office, then, maybe, some others might be willing.
Yes that's how it often works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
Unions aren't monopolies they are collective bargaining. The monopoly on power you are advocating is for a single owner of a company to set all the rules.
So you do view Twitter as a car, which can have an owner. What are the employees then in your scenario?
Musk offers no value to Twitter having purchased it, the value lies in the people working on it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...
If you bought a company, especially a failing company, it wouldn't be business as usual: you would immediately set policies that make the most sense for your shareholders and increase profits.
And, Musk has a reputation to be a very hard 24x7 worker but also one not bound by a timezone, let alone geographic location, but again it's a lot easier for him to note dedication etc based on who actually shows up to work. This might be an undeserved reputation, but he is clearly "on" texting and tweeting at all hours day-and-night, and he's running multiple successful companies simultaneously, so either he's awesome at delegation or he's working very hard (or both).
(of course, he has other shareholders, but he is clearly the majority shareholder and the one who is completely in control of the board, and thus has the greatest legal responsibility to keep twitter solvent and return value to himself and the other investors.)
This is just PR. Seems naive to believe the emperor is wearing clothes.
And not sure how happy they are with Musk and employees not being fully committed to adding value to their investments. Especially given that both companies have serious competition that is increasingly in quality and aggressiveness as each day passes.
On a sidenote, any manager who measures dedication by number of physical hours at the office is either inexperienced or incompetent.
All private corporations in the U.S. have shareholders. (LLC's have members, which are similar.)
The executive team and board of those private corporations have a fiduciary duty to the corporation that they will take actions to increase their investment.
Twitter has at least one major shareholder, Elon Musk, which is why I jokingly wrote "the shareholder" singularly. He also seems to have other institutional shareholders, but it's unclear if he just personally owes the money or if they have taken a collateral interest in Twitter itself. (The latter seems more likely)
Thus, Elon Musk has a fiduciary obligation to his shareholder(s), even if it was just him (it's not).
Like it or not, he is taking steps to reduce the drag on Twitter's finances because he doesn't have a lot of choice.
After burning hundreds of millions of dollars for years, he's got to cut the fat quickly or the company will become insolvent.
Mind sharing where you got that from?
Is this goodbye to @ElonJet?
Also, "troll" seems rather nebulous. Is it the end for anyone seen as a troublemaker?
The wording seems consistent with everything going on at Twitter so far, that he's just kinda winging it while everyone else is frozen in confusion over the abrupt changes. A $44B acquisition is quickly reverting into the volatility of a 2006 startup.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...
Do you mean parody accounts?
Some (hilarious) examples of what I mean can be seen here: https://twitter.com/theserfstv/status/1590593334216916992
These are amusing to look at, but for Twitter to be taken seriously long term this can't keep happening. Musk's $8 Twitter Blue change is what unleashed this chaos in the first place.
No. [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
You think this matters? Did you not see the whole "comedy is legal again" followed by banning/suspending people for parodies? How quickly he went back on "free speech"?
Not to mention not understanding what parody and satire are, of course. To this day there are people who still think Sarah Palin actually said "I can see Russia from my house!" but that doesn't make it not satire.
What is up with the New Left and this total absence of reason and ethics?
Actual parody is completely okay and NOT banned (unlike it was on Old Twitter).
No, and yes. I'm not sure what's difficult to navigate about that? the first might even be commercial speech.
>"What is up with the New Left and this total absence of reason and ethics?"
I don't know? You tell me? Who is the new left? What do they have to do with this conversation at all?
>Actual parody is completely okay and NOT banned (unlike it was on Old Twitter).
There is no category of parody that is "actual parody". There is just parody, and not parody. The examples I provided were all parody that is now again banned... In your example, posting hateful shit as musk is parodic and is banned.
https://www.engadget.com/an-apple-machine-learning-director-...
And in this specific case, Elon's pride may make him see everyone as replaceable.
Half of the people left and the other half has been told to brace for difficult times, it doesn’t sound like good conditions for smooth continuous operation.
Here is my back of the envelope math of how big I think the company should be for their main offering. Over the past years Twitter has acquired a ton of companies, but I'm going to leave them out of this equation.
Eng (250)
===========
Backend/Storage: 100 eng
Subscriptions: 50
Front-End: 50 eng
iOS App: 20 eng
Android App: 20 eng
UX: 10
Abuse/Moderation (200) ========================= Abuse: 100 Moderation: 100
Marketing/Sales (210)
=======================
PR/Marketing: 30
Ad Sales: 180
Mgmt/overhead (40)
=====================
Legal/GDPR/compliance: 20
HR/Recruiting : 10
CEO/CFO/etc.: 10
What do you think? How far off am I? If more people turn to subscriptions perhaps the abuse/moderation team will shrink in the future.
In all seriousness, I think many of us are falling into the trap that the PayPal guy fell into. Twitter isn't just the app and the website. So it's much harder to run and maintain than it seems like from the outside. If it was just the Tweets, why would they ever need more than 10 iOS developers for instance?
If we cut Twitter into what it is on the surface, and perhaps lose some data retention, then sliming down the engineering organization significantly should be possible with the right people. Not to 50, that's really low for a platform the size of Twitter. That being said: 7500 employees is also way to many for what they do, or at least for how little money they make.
K.
Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company. The only reason it went through is thanks to a long line of court rulings starting with Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. that prioritized shareholder interest over every other stakeholders. You can't expect to practically traumatize a company's culture like this and expect all the "right people" to still stay here and give their 100%.
So that was meant as a joke, probably should have left that out.
>Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company
Technically I believe he was forced to buy in the end, but no. You're right, no one asked him to do anything. The shareholders saw an out. They had a failed company on their hands and now the PayPal guy shows up and stupidly promises to buy the whole thing for way more than it's actually worth. Of cause they are going to dump the stock on the idiot, by (legal)forced if they had to. Now it's Musks problem. He has zero ideals when it comes to Twitter culture. He doesn't care. All he currently see is 7500 people who needs a paycheck, paid by him. He stupidly thought he could run Twitter successfully, like most of us HN backseat drivers. When he realized that he can't it was to late and now he stuck and have to either save the company or at least not lose to much more money.
Thats 1.7M tweets a day per moderator. A bit over 3500 per minute.
And thats assuming they work 7 days a week, never get sick, never take vacation.
https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-saas-org-chart
Maybe we're watching different videos though.
Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate issue from the video itself.
It's like that quote from The Office where Michael says Jim is a lazy worker because it takes Jim 20 minutes to complete a project that would take Michael hours to complete. Seems like you're saying you want your least efficient employees and can't be bothered to understand the working habits of your most efficient employees.
Or maybe, just maybe, using time as a sole metric isn't the best way to evaluate employee effectiveness or efficiency.
B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are therefore meaningless.
C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.
My hunch is that its a combination of these two.
I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.
And if there isn't enough work to justify a FTE, then again your metrics are bad. The forecast was not accurate enough. And the only way to know if that's true or not is to fix the formula, do the math again, and figure out the truth.
In both scenarios the employee isn't necessarily the problem, or even a problem at all.
And if we take a step back and evaluate the source material, it's a TikTok video. It's meant to be content. Do we even know if the employee is really only working 20% of the time? We aren't getting a 16 hour live stream here, it's short form content. The truth of the matter is heavily obscured.
It just seems like a bad idea to me to base you're business decisions around a TikTok video, especially when it's one that is adversarial to your employees. Instead, spend the time to understand the reality. Like we might find that the employee is actually working 90% of their workday. And then suddenly you're making decisions that never need to be made in the first place.
> I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.
Depends heavily on function. Plenty of roles are somewhat peaks and valleys of backlogged work. There might be times where some employees really can get their work done using 20% of their day, but then at a different stage they would need to use way more than 20%.
It doesn’t take a genius to observe that there may be some fat to cut.
If you're tightening up the available amenities that should be based on totally different data that has nothing to do with a social media post.
The video struck me as particularly brash given the current economic climate.
If in 2 years Twitter isn't significantly smaller (think 1500 people) and significantly cheaper to run I'd be surprised.
If in 2 years twitter isn't the worst place to work in the valley I'd also be surprised.
No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team members". You just wake up to learn everybody left and you're left with nothing.
I'm making close to the low end of an entry level software engineer at Twitter according to levels.fyi, and I'm making above average for senior software engineers in my region, based on recruiter/job posting salary ranges and posted salaries on these websites. Haven't gotten a regional recruiter offering anything competitive in the past year since I started this job.
Also the unlisted jobs paying anywhere near Twitter level compensation is probably close to 0%, so no need to add them to the mix.
Prizes. Win stupid prizes.
I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications.
Just a thought, I don't really have an opinion here, Twitter is pretty "meh" in my view. I of course hope it ends well for the employees!
Edit: spelling, and fix weird final double bang.
You can quit on the day! It is just not considered "polite" / "professional".
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I suspect though that if he does fire people for refusing to return to the office that given the circumstances (twitter very openly being a 'remote first' workplace for years) that states would view that as a constructive dismissal and at the very least those fired would be eligible for unemployment benefits despite being fired "for cause".
There's a general convention of giving two weeks' notice, but it's not a legal requirement.
No. The vast majority of tech jobs are “at-will” on both sides: either party can terminate the relationship at any moment.
Giving two weeks’ notice is a cultural norm.
No, we're too privileged to be fired:
https://ma.nu/blog/not-going-anywhere
Oops: https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter
On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.
...for some definition of the word "permanent".
I could imagine putting up with a lot of shit from Elon if I believed I was building a better future for humanity in the process, but it's hard to see how a social network is accomplishing that
Nothing says the company can't change their mind.
Im not sure if you are trying to say that because risk is involved we shouldn’t empathize?
I don't. The usual recommendation for buying a house is if you're going to stay there for 5+ years. Job hopping in the valley every 3 years is pretty common. Committing to the remote work lifestyle with an expensive home when it's not clear how long WFH will be an option is a risky move.
I mean buying a house based on a program labeled “permanent” seems pretty low risk to me (especially if you’re in a position making a salary where you can buy a house).
Who could predict that a billionaire would decide to piss in their own cereal and fuck up that plan in the process?
My dad was in the military and I didn’t have a choice but to move every few years when i was growing up. Even with a guaranteed job it’s an extremely stressful situation for a family to be put in.