And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package.
Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.
Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue to get this ratio up.
From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations:
Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021
Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021
Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: "Insane potential for improvement"
The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public transport b) SpaceX is not about putting man on Mars. It is about elon wanting to control world's internet through Starlink. Whenever a small nation falls for the trap raise your voice.
In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless souls.
FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow techies.
In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.
There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%.
Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship.
Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest.
This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
Looking at how Musk handles business and public comms makes me loose more and more respect for this guy with every passing second. It's all fun and games when you have a few hundred mills in the bank. Hopefully the people that left were prepared. Given his public behavior it was kind of expected. I'm not sure if people that stayed are now worse or better off.
When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected. I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just because they liked their coworkers and are sad to see them go. This is a sample size of one, of course, but the layoffs at Etsy were a whole lot smaller than these ones were rumored to be.
I'm not a huge Musk fan, mostly because of his political ramblings and especially revolving around Ukraine; but I find the sudden hatred of him pretty odd. Mass layoffs happen all the time, Square just announced a 14% cut yesterday. In terms of Twitter's current moderation nothing has really changed on the platform, I'm an avid user and have seen no difference.
It's not really just Musk, it feels like there is a turn on any social media platform that doesn't do wide arrays of censorship that lean whatever way you're inclined to agree with (this includes conservatives hating TikTok.) Musk has said he wants a free-speech platform but has never claimed it would have no moderation. There was a piece somewhere about a rise in the use of the N word, but there was no follow up showing if those accounts were banned. Seems like an important part of the story.
Honestly some of this feels like a hit job. I've not found anyone that can point to something inherently wrong with the new vision of Twitter that isn't based in some crazy hyperbole not in tune with reality. Twitter has been horribly run for ages, someone trying to revive it isn't bad.
When I use a platform, unless the person is a literal Nazi or Communist, I don't care what their political beliefs are. I care about the product. I think that is being lost on people where now everything revolves around politics. It's kind of sad, especially when we all basically agree on 90% of things and policy.
We used to complain about data silos and filter bubbles...and now people just leave platforms because leadership may not share their political views? How is that good? I think the media itself has fed into this because they have always hated social media (for better or worse) for making them no longer the first source of news when print was already dying.
I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
And the class action for WARN Act violations has already been filed. Sounds like the Chief Twit didn't give 60 days warning OR severance, as required by law.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...
Everywhere I worked access to systems was revoked before people received their termination communication from HR. This is standard practice in industry to prevent last minute IP theft, or destructive revenge actions at an emotional time.
I don't care a lot about Twitter itself, and I'm willing to entertain the notion that it could function equally "well" with a much smaller fraction of the workforce...
But this is something that should be implemented gradually. Here is someone who just stepped into the company, and he's laying off people en masse. Even if you concede that Musk is some sort of genius (which I don't, but that's besides the point), that doesn't mean that you can just walk into a company and tell from day 1 who is productive and who isn't. And even if you could, making redundancies obsolete isn't something you can just do in one go, even if certain people and processes are inefficient there would probably be a need for a transition period where the institutional knowledge can be transferred.
Given everything else I know about Musk and this deal, this looks to me like a knee-jerk action, not a careful business decision.
Amidst all this doom and gloom and supposedly inevitable failure of Musks' Twitter, I find it interesting to reason about that being a reality. What would replace it?
Nothing. As much as I dislike Twitter overall, it's not replaceable. The main characters driving it (journalists, politicians, the like) have no other central gathering place where they would have the cultural influence that they have now. Their status is exclusively bound to Twitter and cannot be reliably replicated elsewhere.
Have a look at the typical big accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a decade-long history of a few dozen tweets per day. These are the 1-10% Twitter users generating 90% of activity on the network.
Where would they move to? Reddit? Discord? Mastodon? Facebook? I don't think so, that would be a worse experience but more importantly, the audience won't follow.
Twitter power users see themselves as creators, but they are not in the ordinary sense. A photographer or videographer produces tangible content that can stand on its own. As such, they can move it across networks.
The same thing is not true for a tweet. Sure enough you can move a tiny piece of text to another social network, but it makes no sense there. It doesn't have the cultural relevance or unique twitter mechanics of amplification. When your creation is snippets of texts that generate outrage, you're in Twitter prison.
Bottom line, I believe the above is what would keep Twitter alive even if temporarily takes some hits.
Be Civil. Really shouldn't have to be said.
Lots of gross comments here today, and I don't have the time to go check every last username but I only hope it's not long-timers here who are being so snarky and callous at people losing their jobs.
And if it is, y'all should remember that the best developers have long memories. Would be wise to have a little empathy and delight a little less in the turning of the business cycle, even you think it benefits your interests.
A grim day. As a tech worker, my solidarity is entirely with the employees of Twitter.
The irony is that Twitter, more than any other social platform, helped create the aura around Elon, Tesla in particular. In some sense, Twitter was quintessential to what Elon is today.
For him to now - make a bid for twitter - back out of it in futile - acquire it, lay off execs - lay off half the force
Is surreal. If this had been anyone apart from Elon, they would have been ostracized.
I am saddened, but also a bit terrified since I see strong parallels between Elon, and... Other such figures. But Elon now owns a social media platform that "informs" upwards of a 500million users a month.
> Musk’s team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code.
At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these units to loose the content of their flash, every day. This in turn a huge ongoing loss both financial and reputational for the company.
Because of the nature of the bug, we spent something like 3 months trying to find it. We even built a special lab with dozens of units hooked to specially designed rig to have a chance to observe one unit in the process of getting wiped.
Finally, one guy with an oscilloscope cracked it. It was electromagnetic interference between two different circuits within device causing the flash to receive a command telling it to wipe itself clean.
The fix was one line, two characters really.
I am sure Tesla engineers will do a good job evaluating worth of each one of those lines people printed out.
What a contrast in leadership when you compare the way Twitter is doing this (rumor is right before bonus/stock vesting and cold impersonal email) and how Stripe is conducting their layoffs (empathy, 14 weeks severance, bonus payouts, etc.)
Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
Since apparently nobody else in the thread has any empathy for those who've lost their jobs, future access to healthcare (in the US and less civilized countries), and financial security, I guess I'll be the first: I feel bad for people who are laid off by the machinations of billionaires. I wish we lived in a society where it wasn't optimal to act like raving lunatics will tear down every bit of security you have at a moments notice.
For those who are cheering this on - good thing its not you getting mauled by tigers in the gladiator pit, huh?
If true, I find the 'print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days' very grim and a very blunt tool for evaluating productivity.
> "Twitter’s newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter’s plan to build crypto wallets."
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
Feel for the workers being laid off and those that remain. I've been in teams that got decimated and the aftermath is rough. Although it's just a job, you can't help forming a bond with those that you work together with.
Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3 people.
Ex-Tweep here. US employees need to really thank the WARN act. Without it everyone would likely be fired on Oct 31 with no severance. Now everyone is kept on the payroll until Jan (NY until Feb!) and then getting one more month of base salary. We'll see what happens with lawsuit if they manage to get their Feb vest and bonus as well. (they deserve the bonus at least prorated to Nov).
BTW, lots of ML people got hit, also some brilliant ones. Cortex org got hit hard. I guess Musk doesn't care about people running experiments in Notebooks on expensive GPUs.
50% layoffs and likely more attrition soon due to mandatory RTO and people who cannot work 996.
THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)
Just to add, Elon tweeted the following:
"Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required"
hot take:
big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful for humanity instead of selling ads
And here come the lawsuits... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/twitter-s...
Layoffs are really tough on anyone, but Silicon Valley lay-offs are met with more indignation. Most people get laid off, they take the severance, and they start looking for a new job. With Twitter, etc The decision to lay someone office met with such indignation like how dare you lay ME off.
The whole response to the layoffs just doesn’t sit well with me. It’s the righteous elite complaining that they have to eat cake
> print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days
This is either a joke or Musk (or his team) doesn't know about something called version control and how it can be used.
> “To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” the email reads. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.”
Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how companies can force you into home office nowadays if it suits them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the office when it suits them.
One thing I’m surprised to see such little commentary on is the fact that Musk violated California’s WARN Act by not providing appropriate notice of layoffs.
The growth of employees between 2020 and 2022 was insane. There is no way you add 50% more employees over that period and have any sort efficiency.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
How is this affecting no US employees?
For example you cannot just fire people in the UK like you can in the US, it is against the law.
Are there any successful stories of company turn-arounds that start with firing 50% of your workforce?
How much blame should go to Jack + Parag for _doubling_ the twitter work force in just the past couple of years?
In all the brouhaha about the Twitter acquisition this piece of info had personally escaped me:
> Musk’s deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments
puts things in a slightly different perspective. I had somehow assumed that all the acquisition money had come in from Musk himself together with a bunch of other business "friends" or investment vehicles, didn't know there were direct bank loans involved.
"HN: Who wants to be hired?" is going to be wild next month
Why would any engineer stay at this point?
Either, you still believe in the long term vision and that some day it make you rich or you can't find another job. Is the first choice even plausible now?
One thing that's always felt distasteful is the practice of essentially making the company buy itself.
Musk bought Twitter, but Twitter itself is on the hook for $13 billion of that. It reminds me what happened with ToysRUs. It was saddled with the debt of having been taken private by vulture capitalist, eventually couldn't make its interest payments and folded. Despite never really having a down year of sales.
That's right, it was sold, not because it was losing money, but because it wasn't growing at the time. Profits were stagnant. So they were essentially made to buy themselves and the people who engineered this deal and "bought" ToysRUs collected consultancy fees and percentages and made out like bandits.
The difference here is that I don't think there's a clear way for Musk to extract that kind of money from Twitter in the same manner.
Now is a good time for us all to chill, take inventory as the year draws to an end and uncertain economic conditions have us all a little on edge.
Change happens, it's uncomfortable at first but it can be made to work for you too. Change isn't always bad. Can anyone look at Twitters performance as a public company and say that no changes were warranted? Twitters "mission" wasn't exactly being well executed either. Something was bound to happen eventually and this was a long time coming.
Had it been some Generic Private Equity Company that took Twitter private nobody would even be talking about this at all. But since you-know-who lead the buyout a lot of people have their tails in a knot over it. Has anyone considered what a giant hornets nest Elon has kicked in all this? I personally feel sorry for the poor bastard myself and I bet he wishes he could go back in time and ctrl-z all this terrible idea.
More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter. You know this all started off as a silly tweet, that turned into a funny joke, that got serious and became a potentially career wrecking mistake with too much momentum to stop.
Saw a leaked video yesterday from a meeting that Elon wants to basically copy WeChat and become the "everything app" in America. He also laughed at the engineers when they told him that "edit is incredibly complex". Couple that with mass layoffs/restructuring. This saga is gonna be interesting to say the least.
Does this mass layoff comply with the WARN Act and California's mini-WARN?[0] What about all of California's protected classes?[1] The pregnant ladies let go before their FMLA seem especially aggrieved.
Maybe some lawyers here can chime in: How soon will we see some class action lawsuits?
[0]https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/layoff-protections-c...
[1]https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/june/what-are...
I got laid off but least I had the dignity of being told in person, given time to hand over my projects, allowed to remove my personal stuff from my work laptop (did not have any) and a generous severance package - it was about a month.
So thankful I don't work in the US.
I'm personally quite curious how much alignment there is between Jack and Elon, and yet.. Jack was the CEO not too long ago. Jack didn't fix a lot of the things Elon is worked up about. Which makes their communication and cooperation perplexing.
Some context, these are the platforms that are at 1 billion or getting close to 1 billion users:
FB Instagram Youtube Linkedin
Notice that twitter, despite it's age is nowhere close to closing on LinkedIN's current 700 million users.
Those worried about Journalists have not followed the upswing in Instagram users by journalists...some well known Liberal leaning journalist networks are now current Instagram users and creators.
The Twitter employees let go, got a gift of being freed from working for someone that factually is perceived as white superior race advocate including racism.
Advertisers, current Twitter employees and users all have the most important vote and objection to this...our feet and attention.
Hot take, this was bound to happen at one point or another. Everything I’ve read, and witnessed from using the platform always came back to this thought: “how are they even making money on it?”
Policies also placed were just not popular regardless from what you heard from the vocal minority.
I personally hope Twitter develops into a platform that has more fair policies, and makes some sort of profit.
It sucks to be laid off, but honestly it was a bubble waiting to burst. At least these people are getting some sort of severance.
The only thing I hope is that the COs don’t get their golden parachute. They haven’t done much for the platform, and only made it worse for a majority of the user base.
Let's wait for the severance package, I hope they do something similar to Stripe.
Link to search LinkedIn for Twitter employees posting in the last 24 hours. It's more or less 100% people looking for work (at least from the view of my network), so it's a great place to start for people looking to hire. https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?authorCompa...
I was curious about the second Tweet on that page, which states:
>"Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone."
Does anyone if this team published any of their research on algorithmic transparency and algorithmic amplification? Could anyone say more about their work and what if any literature or tooling might be available to the public?
Let's all open our personal professional networks to help these folks laid off find work. Nothing we can do about Elon owning Twitter now but what we can do is help those affected by the layoffs.
I’d be more likely to work with Twitter now to be frank. Elon is obviously trying to implement an engineering lead organisation where coding and productivity are valued.
A lot of these companies tend to be manager heavy, I’ve worked in places where it seemed over half the people in meetings were managers or other unproductive people. It frequently felt like these people were stifling the work as they all had their own agendas etc.
Elon is an engineer first and has s big vision. If you’re one of the people left it must feel like the company has taken a new direction.
Awesome. Finally we get more honesty in the public debate again.
,,The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team was one of a kind''
Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
It's interesting how the firing process presented in the movie Up in the Air (2009) was supposed be inhumane and insulting. Well, look where we are now.
Truly hope that we can use this as an opportunity to make something people want. Obviously we all use Facebook and Twitter because I guess that's all there is. I hope this create an experience vacuum for people on the web because virtual reality snooze offices and/or racially and class deriding ad driven posts that are 140 words are less is not what I thought the future would be.
I never understood why people like Musk are admired that much. He's a bully, period. If you cheer a bully, you're probably also one.
I'm never happy with mass layoffs, but reading some tweets and going through some profiles linked to the article, it is clear to see that some people who were fired, weren't happy with the company. So regardless of their performance, maybe was everything that they needed to find their happiness in another company?
I wonder how people will measure success for Elon/Twitter.
Will it be based on revenue, earnings, MAUs, or some other metric.
Video of Twitter office from inside: https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1585394822407368705/pu/...
Personally, I'd keep the software devs + QA. Most of them probably don't care so much about politics/culture and are hopefully motivated by doing a good job. Without dev+QA, there's no Twitter. So I would understand a total mgmt purge....
Elon is pushing a giant reset button on Twitter. This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt.
Twitter will be fine operationally. It might have some short term hiccups as people pick up the pieces but the network effects and the value proposition are unchanged.
Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.
Sometimes the team that got you there isn't the team that can take you to the next level. I feel bad personally for everyone who liked their job, but many of these jobs existed for years longer than they should have.
These are all smart individuals who have a big important company on their CV. No one is going to fault them for being laid off from Twitter when the cuts are this deep; they're already neck deep in recruiter spam if they have any degree of competence.
Notified of your being let go via a personal email? So no opportunity to back up your data, save contacts (which might come in handy for finding other employment), any notes or drafts... Brilliant idea, honestly ...
I honestly hope this forces twitter to crash and burn. I feel sorry for those who would lose their jobs. That said, twitter is utter garbage and is nothing but a place for people to complain
I fear Elon may have inadvertently laid off potential baby mommas for his next family. Literally throwing out the baby with the bath water type of situation.
So, article is a bit vague on who were let go. Is this gonna have any real impact on operations going forward? Could you really axe half the staff and not?
Serious question about this Twitter sale and how people expect it to go.
What does it really matter to Musk or the other investors if this thing fails spectacularly.
What a bunch of ridiculous whining here.
They are laying off a large portion of workers who have previously expressed being hostile to the new leadership. There is bloat, laziness, aimlessness, and the company is being taken in a radically new direction. It’s pretty tactful so far, as far as I am concerned. We haven’t even seen the severance.
You have nothing to complain about. First priority is to protect Twitter systems, so locking everyone out temporarily (or as the case may be, permanently) makes a lot of sense.
And they are being handled abysmally badly so far. We don't need more Elons. Growth at such human cost is best avoided.
All the hysteria around the purchase proves that Twitter, as it has existed, was very, very important to a lot of people.
cleaning house. nice. we should do the same. during production incidents there are 4:1 managers to engineers.
Remotely logging off employees without telling them anything says a lot about the people in charge
I imagine that, like a lot of big companies, Twitter has a lot of fat that could be trimmed.
deleted, wrong thread. Was aiming for this one:
Where does Twitter fit in Musk's multi-planet strategy?
It seems like people have a totally different thought process when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter and I can’t pin down why.
Whenever a layoff announcement is posted on HN, many people closely scrutinize the wording of the announcement and the severance conditions. Words of consolation are given freely, and occasionally people will offer to help with finding new work. In this thread, though, I find people saying that former Twitter employees need to suck it up and not be entitled babies.
Many who have ardently supported remote work policies (and would raise pitchforks if their employer tried to drag them back into the office) are calling Twitter employees entitled and coddled for attempting to push back.
Elon Musk is great at building new things. Time will tell if he can re-invent an existing thing. So far, it's not looking great.
Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half of the company, without negatively impacting free cash flow, in a week seems like a fool's errand.
I think his success has gone to his head. But time will tell.
> Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone.
If you want to justify your position, I would suggest highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the positive changes you _intended_ to make. If you didn't make any notable positive changes over the time you worked there, that might explain why you no longer do work there.
'Ethical AI' in my opinion is essentially the AI version of 'positive discrimination', i.e. they will keep biasing the inputs and outputs until the algorithm yields the desired result. In this case the desired result in not equality, but "corrected equality". Don't get me wrong, biased and misleading training sets are a problem, but the AI itself is not unethical.
Also I would like to know whether algorithm transparency included blue check-marks (that were obviously biased), or government take-down requests, or the promotion of completely random people for no apparent reason? There was never any intention for algorithm transparency, this is Twitter's 'secret sauce' after all.
I want to know if the product manager that was raving about the yoga rooms and free wine on tap was fired.
The specific team the article mentions, the "inventing and building ethical AI [stuff]" seems like a very reasonable choice for layoff. This is a company in debit, and as such I see no good reason for them to have a long term, unknown timeline, unknown outcomes and (likely) expensive team. Especially considering how much AI critics accuse AI of being racist, sexist and all sorts of impossible to judge human behavior without bias.
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221104125809/https://techcrunc...
Payed fully until February 2nd. Is there anyway for me to sign up to be laid off ?
Who gives a shit?
Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless. Whether or not you liked Twitter, it's a culturally significant platform, and Musk has almost certainly destroyed any hope it had of surviving. In barely a week. Hopefully it destroys him, too.
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> Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1 billion
all sound and fury, signifying nothing
You could say, they were 'deplatformed'
Too much bloat, lazy workers who are overpaid. The whole Silicon Valley needs a big cleanup.
Sweet let me know when they’re hiring.
very exciting times. taking Twitter out of the hands of the woke mob seems to be a real chance to create a useful social network again.
we currently do not have a proper social network:
* Twitter is infested by bots * Facebook is a ghost town for our parents * Instagram is just for narcissists in yoga pants * TikTok is literally a Chinese cyberweapon designed to degenerate western youth
Reddit is somewhat OK, I guess, but like HN, feels too anonymous and therefore not very social.
Craigslist has about 50 employees. If it really had to, Twitter could probably run with 50 employees and AWS.
Is anyone actually looking to hire Twitter people? It was known as a rest and vest place with a bunch of leetcode engineers lmao.
The former owners of Twitter got 44 billion. Why don't they care about their ex-employees? It's a bit cheap to blame Musk (only).
Musk lost the thread a while ago but it’s weird watching people complain about someone doing what he wants with something he owns.
Like, it’s his. It is his property. He bought it.
Big fan of judgement swarms over what you do with your property, are ya?
No?
(Not an endorsement of his management techniques nor this idiotic purchase, but, it is his now.)
I have a question: why companies like Twitter need so many people? I'm sorry but it doesn't seem that hard to replicated Twitter functionality and scalability (with the right people on team). What are the engineers actually doing the whole day? Why do they need so many lines of code? All mysterious to me.
I don't get all this antipathy towards what Musk is doing. It's an established maxim of the venerated Warren Buffet that the very first thing you need to do after buying a company is clean house, and get rid of the people who put it in the shape that made it buyable to begin with, starting, and especially, at the top.
The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team. i find it interesting Twitter need a ethics, transparency and accountability team for ML. is Twitter worry about creating a Skynet or something?
How many of these employees signed a letter of "demands" towards their new CEO?
I'm sorry, but I have a really difficult time feeling anything other than schadenfreude for these people. You guys are making how much money working at a company which appears to be unable to actually make money, and at which you appear to see yourselves more as activists than employees.
The gall of these people to then put together a letter of "demands" (not suggestions or requests, DEMANDS), and then the next week complain that they're being asked to show what they've been working on for the last month is just...
Sorry guys, but the gravy train of $250k/yr as a 23 year old product manager working 2 hours a week remotely while making tik toks about how cute your life is are over.
A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules."
This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.