Not only would I not work there, at some point soon I’d refuse to hire anyone who could have left but hasn’t.
A healthy organization needs people who can question bad leadership. Elon is driving those people away. Those who are left will be those who will support narcissistic leaders in whatever organization they later join.
Obviously there will be exceptions - people on visas etc.
It's less about anonymous account and more that this account is new, and has mostly only replied to posts about Twitter which all but this are flagged as dead. Not looking like a very useful account that is going to come in with constructive discussions.
I have a friend that works there and elected to stay. His reasoning was that he has been there 9 years, so if they did fire him soon, he would get more than 3 months severance (he thinks it would be 1 month for every year, so 9 months).
I don't know if that is true (written into a contract?), but I also didn't have the heart to tell him that if a company goes bankrupt, they probably don't pay out severance.
Parent is pointing out that if you view the current twitter situation as "a good job" then they don't think the way you view the world would be healthy for their business.
There's no reason to believe this poster has any say over hiring decisions.
I have doubts you or anyone would actually follow through on such a ridiculous claim.
I (and I have to believe many) would be thrilled to interview and work with folks who decided to stay at Twitter during the Elon takeover. In an era of wave after wave of frothy VC money anointing so many inexperienced and ineffective leaders in our industry, the opportunity to learn under a uniquely effective, authentic and bold leader are tremendous.
Please explain it for the rest of the class so we don't all just assume that our differing interpretations are all correct individually. (And personally, I don't have a clue what's being implied but I'm probably just being oblivious).
Lots of important work does not involve hammering away all hours of the night. For example, any work that interfaces with the outside world will be constrained by the availability of people in the outside world. Are advertising clients working at midnight on a Sunday? We've known for many, many years, that hours worked and value delivered do not correlate (which applies in technical roles, too).
Why do you feel it is desirable for people to work as many hours as possible? Is that how to want to live your life? Have you no other pursuits or things you care about? What is all the work for, in the end?
I don't care how many hours people work. Sometimes in business you need to do a lot of work in a short period of time. He's being fairer than any employer I've had, they would just assign me the work and expect me to put the time in, Elon letting you opt out with 3 months severance to find another job is a decent option I might have taken on a few occasions.
I say Yes. This represents an attractive opportunity to get in on an artificial ground floor of a large business who’s demise is (very) likely overhyped.
What's the comp? Is it a typical FAANG range? Do you get a lot of stock options for a hypothetical future (re-)IPO?
If there aren't outsized benefits, then the only compelling reasons left are that you either really love the product or the leadership against the opportunity cost of all other jobs.
The work culture is admittedly "sleep under the desk" intense. Typical startup vibes, and it's unclear at this point with what autonomy/product ownership that comes with.
Taking this job either needs to come from a place of really loving what you do or being compensated extremely well.
I'm wondering what the value of having "Twitter" on your resume when job searching will have. After all the press on this, I'm wondering if potential employers would look favorably as you being "resilient" or capable of handling high stress situations if you choose to stay for another 2 years or so.
Quickly changing corporate situations offer huge growth opportunities to folks who otherwise would be stuck grinding away at the corporate ladder. Instead of being stuck on a team managing a button in some flow, you might end up navigating into a team that works on core caching, or something else you've been interested in but never had the opportunity to work on. Some folks will be willing to take a slight pay cut if they can leverage it for huge future career growth. That's a big If though, with the way the optics around Musk's situation is right now.
In what sense do you mean "ground floor"? Financially this can't be true, due to massive debt financing of a ridiculous overvaluation.
Technologically and careee skill wise doesn't make much sense either.
I agree that the demise is overhyped, which is also why there's not really much of a ground floor, it's falling from heights down to the ground, or already high.
At another point in my life I would have said yes. I think I agree with this assessment of the company vs perception overall, but at this point in my life/career I would rather that if I'm going to be working 12+ hours a day to push products out, that I would be on more even footing as a cofounder or super early employee than a Musk vision factory that's just reimagining a 15 year old product.
...agreed. Contrary to the HN bias, it might be interesting to work for a high energy/high demand place. After you rebuild the staff with people who have not been involved in the recent leadership change, it could turn out to be a fantastic place to work with engineering folks focused on a singular mission. Who knows, but it's worth a shot. That said, not sure how long I might last :-)
I've worked at a lot of startups, and I love that energy.
But part of what I enjoy about it is that I can make a make a real difference in building something new and setting direction, and the sense that all of us are in this together.
That's a totally different vibe than when I'm doing maintenance on a 15 year old codebase, with a billionaire second guessing everything I do
Appreciate the point of view, but I am a systems/infra engineer - not coder. It would be pretty cool to learn how Twitter keeps its infrastructure running all the time. Even though I have been doing my speciality for a long time, I would certainly like to see how others run infrastructure at scale.
if i got paid a bunch, sure. sounds fun. and if it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world. people are making this into more than what it is.
EDIT: I just remembered twitter is HQed in san francisco; unless elon also becomes mayor, there isn't enough money in the world you could pay me to work there nonremote. but i would vote yes for any other city where theft is still illegal and there isn't human shit on the pavements.
still 3x more than what i make. and if i can get a visa more easily because a bunch of pampered americans threw their toys out of the pram and quit, great.
I mean, I read it more as, it isn't a yes or no, it's "everyone has a price". I'll do your dirty, high-stress work for a price.
For $800k? Yeah, we probably have a deal. For the parent poster's price, absolutely we have a deal. But that offer will never exist, and I rather doubt the lower $800k offer would ever happen.
Sign on bonuses are usually contingent on you staying for a certain period, and are paid out in chunks. At least that's how it had been anytime I was offered one.
US-based principal and senior staff engineers, as well as staff engineers who negotiated hard with competing offer(s) and/or saw significant stock growth between their RSU grant and vest dates, could all have plausibly been clearing $800k in a given recent year. Even senior engineers, in outlier cases of the stock growth case.
But as of the takeover, RSUs and options are likely being offered valued at the takeover price, while Elon knows the next 409A will likely value the company at ¼ of that.
Twitter went public at $45 a share and only had a max of $77. Sure some engineers could have almost doubled their RSU valuations if they had perfect timing but this isn't a case like GOOG/APPL/TSLA where 100x jumps occurred. Or is my thinking here naive?
I think your thinking is correct, and “almost doubled” is the kind of multiplier I was thinking of for the outlier, but not unrealistic, cases of some staff engineers or even occasionally senior engineers ending up with as much as $800k total comp in a given recent year. No need for 100x or even 5x stock growth to have occurred.
Yea, that's pretty much my point of view as well - at this point the salary I'd demand would be obscene but given how many bridges Musk is burning I feel like he'll be desperate soon. I would, however, try and organize a union if hired on and I encourage anyone currently at the company to investigate collective bargaining to ensure you have a more stable working environment. Being fired from twitter on twitter is absolutely ridiculous and creates a terrible working environment.
I think the question is posed as, for $200k today, maybe with $200k of options (with a strike price likely 4-5x the next expected 409a) in a privately owned company.
I think this would be an exceedingly good time to demand your salary in all cash. I, personally, am baffled by how he thinks he's going to manage to cover the debt service payments - let alone paying down the actual principle. He's essentially going to need to pull an entirely new monetization model out of his ass and the 8/verified isn't actually nearly enough to even put a dent in the debt. Also - forcing cash transfers from SpaceX into Twitter via overpriced ad buys isn't a long term plan as it's probably super illegal.
My remark wasn't regarding public poo-flinging from employees to Elon, I agree, it is unprofessional and I would expect more. However, I would also expect my CEO to also not be a poo-flinging memester, too.
He sent an email out asking for employee loyalty (to him?). That is behaviour that is in line with someone who wants only sycophants. Perhaps you read it differently to me.
Leaning no. But very much depends on what the salary would be. Though seeing as the risk of the company collapsing is super high it would have to be a high salary to compensate.
No but only because I don't like the product. Nothing to do with current events.
Edit: I hadn't seen this yet (https://www.businessinsider.com/read-musks-midnight-email-te...). Another commenter posted that. I still don't have any opinions of current events, don't really care about Twitter, wouldn't work there because I don't like the product - but I won't work for any company that expects employees to work overtime regularly as part of the company culture.
You know, I was reading some of the comments here and I was thinking, “maybe it wouldn’t be so bad…” but your simple statement brought me back to self congruence. Thanks for that.
This situation is very attractive to say yes to. However everything I see from Musk makes me think he doesn’t value the engineering that goes into Twitter. He thinks it’s easy and doesn’t require the best minds unlike his space company. That makes it impossible to win or please the boss. Not a lot pace for anyone to work if what I said is true.
No remote work is a dealbreaker for me! I also refuse to work at a company with an overall negative impact on the world. As far as I can tell, Twitter's subscription walls (for essential government services) and "bubble" effect isn't making the world a better place. We can only guess about Elon's future direction for the company... but given the pay-for-verified-check snafu last week, I don't think he's trying to make the world a better place with Twitter. Maybe he's trying to make it better for Twitter power users like himself, but even that I'm not sure of.
If I didn't have a family and still lived in SF, I would jump at the chance I think. Maybe I couldn't keep up the "hardcore" hours for many years, but I think I'd come out of it for the better. I've never thrown myself at something to the degree where I'd be sleeping at my office, but why not life's sort.
Only roadblock would be if he expects TOO much grinding. But 40 hours week of focussed intense work seems fine.
I'm optmistic about twitter under him. He seems intent on actually advancing the platform. There would be real work. What had Twitter achieved lately before Musk takeover? Not very much!
(Though I do really appreciate that they added back a strictly chrono timeline, and I will be very sad if that gets axed...)
To me a true highlight of how dysfunctional Twitter was was that they bought the viral hit app Vine, did nothing with it, eventually killed it, only to watch the very-similar TikTok take over the entire world. Show's what an absolute lack of ambition to build stuff existed at Twitter, IMO.
Yes, it's a unique opportunity to watch well-built infrastructure fail under load and any success at keeping the product going will be a real achievement. I like what I'm doing now and I don't trust the guy though so comp would have to be maybe $2M/year and paid one year in advance.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadA healthy organization needs people who can question bad leadership. Elon is driving those people away. Those who are left will be those who will support narcissistic leaders in whatever organization they later join.
Obviously there will be exceptions - people on visas etc.
I don't know if that is true (written into a contract?), but I also didn't have the heart to tell him that if a company goes bankrupt, they probably don't pay out severance.
There's no reason to believe this poster has any say over hiring decisions.
I (and I have to believe many) would be thrilled to interview and work with folks who decided to stay at Twitter during the Elon takeover. In an era of wave after wave of frothy VC money anointing so many inexperienced and ineffective leaders in our industry, the opportunity to learn under a uniquely effective, authentic and bold leader are tremendous.
https://www.businessinsider.com/read-musks-midnight-email-te...
> One Twitter employee speaking on the condition of anonymity said: "I have no clue what this means for non-technical roles."
You know what Elon might be on to something.
If your job literally only entails things that happen during business hours, like you man the front desk, I'd wager people would be reasonable.
If there aren't outsized benefits, then the only compelling reasons left are that you either really love the product or the leadership against the opportunity cost of all other jobs.
The work culture is admittedly "sleep under the desk" intense. Typical startup vibes, and it's unclear at this point with what autonomy/product ownership that comes with.
Taking this job either needs to come from a place of really loving what you do or being compensated extremely well.
Technologically and careee skill wise doesn't make much sense either.
I agree that the demise is overhyped, which is also why there's not really much of a ground floor, it's falling from heights down to the ground, or already high.
But part of what I enjoy about it is that I can make a make a real difference in building something new and setting direction, and the sense that all of us are in this together.
That's a totally different vibe than when I'm doing maintenance on a 15 year old codebase, with a billionaire second guessing everything I do
EDIT: I just remembered twitter is HQed in san francisco; unless elon also becomes mayor, there isn't enough money in the world you could pay me to work there nonremote. but i would vote yes for any other city where theft is still illegal and there isn't human shit on the pavements.
For $800k? Yeah, we probably have a deal. For the parent poster's price, absolutely we have a deal. But that offer will never exist, and I rather doubt the lower $800k offer would ever happen.
I don't think that means he necessarily wants sycophants.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect respectful communication from your employees, and to not be publicly contradicted.
We're in a strange phase in the U.S. where this is a lesson that many young people are learning the hard way.
He sent an email out asking for employee loyalty (to him?). That is behaviour that is in line with someone who wants only sycophants. Perhaps you read it differently to me.
Edit: I hadn't seen this yet (https://www.businessinsider.com/read-musks-midnight-email-te...). Another commenter posted that. I still don't have any opinions of current events, don't really care about Twitter, wouldn't work there because I don't like the product - but I won't work for any company that expects employees to work overtime regularly as part of the company culture.
That’s exactly why not.
I'm optmistic about twitter under him. He seems intent on actually advancing the platform. There would be real work. What had Twitter achieved lately before Musk takeover? Not very much!
(Though I do really appreciate that they added back a strictly chrono timeline, and I will be very sad if that gets axed...)
To me a true highlight of how dysfunctional Twitter was was that they bought the viral hit app Vine, did nothing with it, eventually killed it, only to watch the very-similar TikTok take over the entire world. Show's what an absolute lack of ambition to build stuff existed at Twitter, IMO.
I already saved a couple of projects and companies from eminent disaster, but that was not for free.
If you're close to elon, let him know I'd help him and expect to retire after a short tenure in the company.