6 months ago it was all painted (maybe seemingly, though, by prior executives who weren't speaking for Musk) as if this wouldn't be a big deal for employees, which to me makes this idea that people are being rapidly fired "for cause" after a suddenly-imposed weekend work shift deadline extra shitty :/. (Even if I do sometimes claim that Twitter is incompetent as an organization or bloated with idle staff, these are humans that deserve some basic respect with how they handle a transition plan.)
> At the meeting with employees on Monday [April 25], executives tried to assure employees that they wouldn’t be shortchanged by Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would convert to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he estimated would take between three and six months. Employees would receive their same benefits packages for a year after the deal was finalized and there were no immediate plans for layoffs, he added.
Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would convert to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he estimated would take between three and six months. Employees would receive their same benefits packages for a year after the deal was finalized and there were no immediate plans for layoffs, he added.
So, really those two long sentences should be rewritten:
Mr Agrawal, as an officer of the company, engaged in rampant speculation, perhaps to reassure employees (or himself) that their jobs were safe for three months to a year, even though Mr. Musk had repeatedly indicated otherwise.
I think he would have known he was out the door since part of the reason Musk was saying he was buying Twitter in text messages was that he thought Agrawal wasn't up to the job. With a 52 million payout, I also think he wasn't overly worried about how he would do after Twitter.
Tesla is currently engaged in litigation over allegedly firing employees without providing necessary 60 day notice period under California law, denying them pay as a result, so it would appear that Musk has precedent.
Precedent is when there's case law backing something. I think you're thinking of Musk's PR and decision making, not the company: there certainly isn't case law for letting go of _25% of the company, for cause_
> Precedent is when there's case law backing something.
No, you're thinking of a restricted version of the second definition from Merriam-Webster, while it was clearly the first definition that was meant.
precedent. noun
1. an earlier occurrence of something similar
2. a : something done or said that may serve as an example or rule to authorize or justify a subsequent act of the same or an analogous kind a verdict that had no precedent
b : the convention established by such a precedent or by long practice
TANSTAAFL. (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)
The downside of employee protections is that it makes companies more reluctant to hire. And also once hired, the salary to be offered is reduced to cover the estimated current value of the future employee protections. These are real downsides, particularly for young people who are trying to get a foot into the corporate ladder.
I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)
So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.
If increased employee protection causes you to layoff almost everyone in a country -- you probably had little good business reason to be in that country.
Employee protection exists because there's a huge power imbalance. A company who can constantly just say, "we'll fire you if this doesn't get done" and colludes with other companies on such matters makes it very difficult for workers. This is why employee protection, unions, etc... exist.
> If increased employee protection causes you to layoff almost everyone in a country -- you probably had little good business reason to be in that country.
This kind of directly speaks to the commenters point. There may have “little good”, but enough reason until the legal change to increase employee protections created “no good reason”.
That's absolutely true, but in practice most people would experience substantial hardship if they suddenly lost their job.
I wouldn't, but being in a country with employee protections means the people around me are almost never placed in a desparate situation, and I am meaningfully safer because of that.
> Since you'd get more pay without these protections, you can save the excess for a rainy day.
It sounds like you are speaking from a position of extreme privilege, more than 165 million Americans (over half) do not have a spare ~$400 for an emergency, much less savings to pay rent after a sudden job loss.
And when people get desperate some turn to crime. Which then increases your costs through increased taxation for policing and incarceration and secondary effects such as reduced safety and increased personal costs due to crime, such as increased insurance costs and the greater threat of being targeted.
So when all costs are internalized, worker protections pay dividends at making a society better for all involved, for example the many northers European countries with very low crime and very strong worker protections.
> It sounds like you are speaking from a position of extreme privilege, more than 165 million Americans (over half) do not have a spare ~$400 for an emergency
"Extreme"? What nonsense. I know many middle class people who don't have a spare $400 for an emergency. They also have a boat in the driveway. They don't have an income problem, they have a spending problem.
> And when people get desperate some turn to crime.
Or sell the boat. I remember one couple I counselled that couldn't pay the rent, but had a new car. I suggested they sell that, and buy one they could afford. I was surprised to find out that's just what they did.
It's not a poverty problem, it's a financial management problem. Don't conflate that with being actually poor.
> when people get desperate some turn to crime.
Crime causes poverty, not the other way around.
The downside to treating employees like children is a lower standard of living.
Most people _don’t_ save for a rainy day. That’s an objective fact; imagining it would be otherwise if you gave them a bit more money is a fantasy not supported by anything observed in reality.
As to finding another job: of course they will, but switching costs are pretty high for job changes.
You likely won’t get more pay. In times without protections against collusion and without minimum wages, and laws against child labor — wages don’t typically go up. But you will have more workers in labor. Just not protected and poorer.
Pay for workers is set by Supply&Demand, just like everything else. Adding worker protections increases costs to hire, which reduces demand, and so salaries drop.
Yeah you are absolutely right. Here in germany a lot of companies pay a decent premium on temporary/loan workers and freelancers just to not be bound to then.
> TANSTAAFL. (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)
Maybe not, but the world isn't zero-sum. Some things really do raise or lower the overall average.
> I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)
What was the law change? And how long would it have been before those employees were laid off otherwise? That's an interesting datapoint to hear about, but "employee protections" can mean many different things.
> So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.
Unfortunately you don't get to skip out on the hidden downsides of at will either.
Yes, free lunches exist but to see them you have to measure in utiles rather than straight-up dollars.
At-will is a huge risk for the individual, since they're going from roughly 100 % employment to 0 % employment.
On the other hand, in a decently sized organisation (where employee protection is typically enforced), being stuck with a bad employee and asking them for meaningless work that bothers nobody else means paying for 100 % capacity and only getting, say, 94 % of it. Over a large number of employees, the organisation can be fairly confident of what this percentage will be. Much smaller risk.
In other words, the utility cost for the employer of employee protection is smaller than the utility cost of at-will for the individual.
(Homeowner's insurance is a similar type of situation. Makes no sense to the individual if you look at the dollar costs, but in terms of utiles it does actually work out for both parties in most cases. Another case is hedging major business expenses -- costs more, but you and the counterparty both lose fewer utiles from it.)
The law change would double the period for which severance had to be paid. This additional liability would have been a significant fraction of the net worth of the company.
The 2008 financial crisis had left the company in a position where it needed to downsize anyways, and the board of directors gave the CEO the choice between covering that liability by making the US layoff bigger, or avoiding the extra liability by getting rid of basically the whole Argentinian operation. The CEO chose to preserve US jobs.
The Argentinian operation would have seen a layoff either way. But nowhere near as dramatic as the one that actually happened.
>The downside of employee protections is that it makes companies more reluctant to hire. And also once hired, the salary to be offered is reduced to cover the estimated current value of the future employee protections.
Yep, that why software engineers in California and New York, where there are a lot of employee protections, don't get paid as much as SWEs in the Midwest or the South, where there are less... Right?
Or maybe the real economy is more complex than the kiddie models you were taught in Econ 101?
The WARN act for one, which Musk may have violated. California also mandates sick leave and family leave for both parents of a newborn child.
When California says you can fire an employee for any reason, what they really mean is any reason except for a bunch of reasons we've decided are unacceptable.
Silicon Valley, New York, and arguably Texas have been the hubs of computing innovation as long as there has been a commercial computer industry. Other tech hubs have sprung up, but we're looking at forty years of unceasing domination here. Innovation hubs move when new industries arise.
Innovation hubs have been in China, Middle East, Venice, London, etc.
The printing innovation lasted around 300 years. Steam engine another 150 years. The industrial revolution less than 100.
How long do you think computers will dominate major innovation? And if it does, will the innovation hub stay in SV ?
What happens if biotech takes over? MRNA tech ? Driverless cars ? VTOL ? Rocketry or Space Tourism ? ML or low-code apps changing the dev of software as we know it today ?
Do you see any of those hubs in SV ? Are they in SV today ?
Now you're moving the goalposts from decades to centuries, across which it is slightly absurd to pretend that 'innovation hubs' have anything to do with workers' rights. Changes in culture happen regardless of where the innovation is, and when you start talking about centuries it's pointless to try to measure the effect of worker protections on salaries. There are just too many variables over that amount of time. Pretending you can effectively isolate one is ridiculous.
Regardless: yes, all of these things are in SV today. If any of them proves to revolutionize society in our lifetime I think you'll find SV will retain its status.
My only note it is that isn’t 40 years. For SV it’s more like 60 years (going back to the founding of Fairchild) or even longer if you want to go back as far as HP and other radio shops.
For NYC, it’s even longer. IBM has had a major NYC presence since at least the 30s (and obviously its main HQ is less than 40 miles from midtown)! Bell Labs/AT&T was based in Manhattan before moving to New Jersey and obviously is still in the NYC are. And that goes back to the 20s I think.
Not to mention other NYC and NYC adjacent companies like GE. So we’re going back 100 years or more for NYC and 80 for SV.
Xerox’s history combines both areas.
And as you said, Texas has a strong history too with the Motorola stuff and Silicon Prairie.
Historically speaking, Seattle is a relatively new entrant in computing and innovation, only really being a hub for 40 years or so (unless you count Boeing and then it back over 100 years), but is the home of two of the biggest companies of the last 50 years, Microsoft and Amazon.
Dozens and dozens of cities all over the world have tried to be the Silicon Valley of X and none have succeeded. And New York is extremely unique as a global center in dozens of different industries from finance to media to fashion to the arts.
Obviously things could be disrupted. But both of these areas have been innovation hubs for over 100 years, which given the short history of this country, is remarkable.
We have already seen what the world is like with no employee protections - exploitation of children for labour, like in the British coal mines. Unsafe working conditions in Victorian workhouses, leaving men without hands and without means to feed their family, and with no compensation because 'you agreed to it'. Bosses extorting sexual favours from employees, i.e. Hollywood casting couch.
You can still see this in many developing countries, children on assembly lines in China, or how a clothing factory in Bangladesh caved in killing most women working there.
TANSTAAFL is obviously and demonstrably false - child labour leaves them without education and traps them in poverty. Their creativity and future potential is lost to society. Employees without hands are an obvious loss to society. But the employer doesn't care, he saved a few bucks on safety. He isn't paying the cost. This argument further extends to education and beyond.
The argument of TANSTAAFL was used by coal companies in the 1920's. At the time they used to hire assassins to murder Union leaders and even killed the local sheriff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg9xywAxb10
This also sometimes happens in developing nations today, sometimes at the behest of western companies.
What is the 'argument of TANSTAAFL' here? It just means there are hidden costs to things that appear free. From that coal video, when the coal companies gave the miners the clothes and gear for 'free', but there were all the hidden costs- that would be an example of TANSTAAFL, but it's not being used as an argument.
People use the same argument to justify removing minimum working age laws, weekend laws, OSHA laws, EPA protections, retirement, healthcare etc.
In a pure unregulated market, employers would be able to offer employees much higher salaries!
The reality is somewhere in the middle. Though what America thinks is reasonable is very different than what the rest of the developed world thinks is.
Indeed! Harder to hire, harder to fire. Like most such schemes, it advantages those already inside at the cost to those looking in from the outside; see also rent control.
Competition? If everyone is paying an extra 20% in overhead, then that’s an extra 20% they can’t put down as competing bids for the resource in question
And vice versa… if multiple companies want that resource.. they all have 20% more to bid with
I read this as "code termination" instead of "co determination" and was about halfway through the wikipedia article and quite confused before I figured it out.
That's because unions are an integral part of the way many of the countries socio-political systems work. In Norway, for instance, the trades unions and the employers get together once a year to hammer out what is called tarriflønn, essentially the going rate for each broad type of job. The state provides a referee for the meetings whose job is to keep them on track and to encourage both sides to compromise. Unions and companies work together rather than fight each other, most of the time.
But this can only work if there is a broad consensus that we are all in the same boat and that we will all be better off if we work together.
The attitude, that appears to be common, in the US that employers are always exploitative, employees are always lazy and thieving, that the government is just a parasite, and that the aphorism "Good enough for government work" is a synonym for delivering shoddy work means that no one trusts anyone so you end up fighting all the time.
It should be noted that European unions were no less militant originally. Being militant (and strong enough) is what gets you concessions - including better arrangements for future deals.
Of course, no argument there. But European society even then wasn't quite so polarised as the US seems to be now. So being militant was effective. Somehow unions in the US seem to have got such a bad reputation that even those who would benefit from them don't join.
Unless some of your colleagues don't go along with it and are willing to train recruits enough to keep the ship afloat. Unions: the anti-anti-trust weapon in the war to win the balance of power.
Montana is the biggest exception. It's only at-will for a 6-month probationary period, and after that, you can generally only be fired for "good cause".
> A redundancy is different to being fired, and comes with a payout depending on length of tenure with the company.
In US usage, the general term here is “layoff”. And severance is not a legal requirement, and practices vary considerably by industry and, within industries, by individual firm. Layoff is eligible for unemployment, while firing may or may not be. (The line is also looser because the US has at-will employment, so there are very little general rules–other than those in particular employment contracts of unionized or high-status employees–around termination other than for prohibited purposes, or–mostly around warning periods–mass terminations, but there are conditions for unemployment assistance.)
Yeah I know broadly they all are, but some states offer slightly more protection.
On a side note, what happens to health insurance for employees who're let go? Does it end the time of your last day or midnight? I was too afraid to Google it as I likely knew it's be pretty cut throat, but have always stressed about it regardless.
Generally the end of the month that you were terminated in, unless you pay the same company to keep the same plan via COBRA. It's the same plan, you're just paying what you paid for it before plus whatever the company was paying for your share, which is generally much higher.
It might be immediate, it might be end of month, might be some other period. In any case COBRA kicks in and can be paid for retrospectively if you need it.
They have not. Not in California, New York, or Washington states anyway. California updates Tuesdays and Thursdays but nothing was filed last week.
Tesla filed 3 WARN notices in California in July so Musk or Musk’s lawyers at least know how to file them.
From what I understand, Twitter’s standard terms of severance allow for two months salary and benefits and some sort of accelerated vesting towards the next quarter. That’s been the big question for employees because they vest quarterly (though each person could have a different vest date) and the terms of the acquisition were that RSUs were converted to cash to be paid out on the vest schedule. Some in the press speculated that Musk was trying to avoid paying our November 1 vests by firing early, but given that you’d need a WARN notice anyway, that wouldn’t prevent anything. If there was an accelerated vest you missed by a few days, that might be something that could be avoided, but I don’t know.
Still, even if you are paying out two months of benefits and salary (and potentially maybe even more, with accelerated vesting), that doesn’t mean a company doesn’t have to file a WARN notice.
And with the expected figures being 25% of employees (~1800 people), that figure would qualify as a mass layoff by federal definition, irrespective of the company’s total size, and irrespective of the 50 or 100 per site thresholds that are true for specific states.
You don't "file" a WARN act notice. You directly give the affected employees notice.
Or much more likely you give them 2-3 months severance which is basically the same as saying "you are laid off in 60 days, don't bother coming back to work". Technically they would be breaking the law but the severance would count against the damages under the WARN act so there's no reason to go to court about it.
§2102. Notice required before plant closings and mass layoffs
(a) Notice to employees, State dislocated worker units, and local governments
An employer shall not order a plant closing or mass layoff until the end of a 60-day period after the employer serves written notice of such an order—
(1) to each representative of the affected employees as of the time of the notice or, if there is no such representative at that time, to each affected employee; and
(2) to the State or entity designated by the State to carry out rapid response activities under section 3174(a)(2)(A) of this title, and the chief elected official of the unit of local government within which such closing or layoff is to occur.
If there is more than one such unit, the unit of local government which the employer shall notify is the unit of local government to which the employer pays the highest taxes for the year preceding the year for which the determination is made.
Correct me if I’m wrong but it all really depends on the contract. I understand there are labor laws in place but if the person agreed to something then I don’t think California law can do much.
From what I've seen posted elsewhere California requires companies laying off more than 50 individuals to file. Failure to do so cause the state can step in and force the employer to pay a couple months of severance. Most California labor laws cannot be waived by contract
California has some of the most stringent labor laws in the country, and labor attorneys have told me judges tend to not look favorably upon contracts that are in direct violation of those laws… especially when those contracts are drafted by high powered legal teams.
If articles on HN are any guide, CEOs say this up until the moment that layoffs occur. It goes something like "while we had hoped and worked to avoid impacting personnel, changes in the macroeconomic conditions have made it impossible for us to..."
Every CEO I've seen oversee layoffs has maintained that no layoffs were planned until the very millisecond they're announced. I think of CEOs like I think of the WH press secretary - paid to propagandize.
From your other posts I surmise you know this, but the WARN act means that a company of Twitter's size can't lie about that, at least without then paying out a full notice period to all affected workers.
How many devs at twitter have no code to show for the past month, because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working? I would guess more than a few. Firing those "for cause" will probably be easy; they stopped working for a month and anybody can get fired for that.
Those that remained productive will probably have better prospects for keeping their jobs, and for suing if they're fired.
> because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working?
To a first approximation I would guess 0.
When a company is teetering on calamity, people don't just stop doing things, they just stop doing things in organized, co-ordinated ways.
More than that, firing people for cause usually requires records and a demonstration of dialog the the person (not all jurisdictions) and is hard to demonstrate.
We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now -- why would it start to matter now, particularly for those at more senior levels?
> We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now
You're severely overstating it. The difference between 500 loc and 5000 loc isn't a clear signal of anything. But zero lines of code certainly is. Firing people because the VCS shows they stopped working is common.
I sort of think of the absolute value of lines changed as a pulse.
You can do -100. You can do 100. You can net zero from 100 adds and 100 subtracts (abs=200). But it’s something. If you have long stretches of zero that’s not good.
In case this wasn't clear, when I say "no code" I mean no commits, nothing they can point to as evidence of doing any work. Afaic, commits removing code count for at least as much as those adding code. And if they've spent the past month adding documentation to the intranet wiki or something like that, there should be logs they can show to prove it.
Sure. But a code review of their checkins will reveal their productivity pretty quick. Any one claiming 10x (or even 0.75x) productivity would want some very good supporting evidence if they have zero activity in the source control for a month. You want some great specification documents or API documentation or platform architecture diagrams or something…
At a previous job I had a few months where I managed approximately minus‐1 instruction per week — and it was the best money the company ever spent. Hard constraints are hard.
not everything is committed in a VCS: you have documentation, architecture, RFC etc etc depending on the size of the company and seniority of the employee.
I have no stake in the matter. My supposition that some employees simply stopped working comes from my experience seeing similar things happen at other companies during periods of uncertainty, and from my knowledge that quite a few twitter employees were very uncertain about their future with twitter.
There are people on my team that haven’t committed anything for a couple weeks. I don’t work at Twitter, but wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who basically weren’t working.
I spent the last month prototyping code for a demo that will not be checked in. I have a few small unrelated CLs submitted (minor fixes) but I spent 5 minutes per each, my main work for the month is completely unaccounted for in version control.
For your own sake, you should probably check that demo code in somewhere. Keeping a 'paper' trail of the work you've done is always a good practice to follow.
While you are correct that LOC is not a full measure of productivity, and there are many factors to consider, it would be nonsense to say that merging code has no bearing on productivity. All things equal (and disregarding engineers whose job isn’t coding per se), submitted code is the essential deliverable of a software engineer.
No, “solved problems” is the essential deliverable of a software engineer, and the more senior one gets the less often “submitting code” is the correct path to solving a problem. Someone might submit code based on your work, but there’s no direct correlation between “submitted code” and “did your job” at higher levels.
sometimes the most senior engineers don't ship a ton of code to prod, but they should certainly be writing code to figure out where the organization should go, justify the ROI of their ideas, demonstrate a large-scale problem that needs resources mustered, interrogate business logic databases to tie disparate ideas together, understanding the scale and frequency of large scale problems, and so on. If you're a senior engineer and can't point to any code you've written in the past 3 months, maybe you're not really an engineer, because you're not using engineering to solve problems.
I think a lot of software engineers get too comfortable with the idea that meetings are deliverables - they aren't; meetings are coordination and planning. if nobody completes the work that was coordinated and planned, the meeting was nothing but a waste of time. Depending on your seniority as an engineer, you may have written code to decide that the work should be done, or you may be tasked with writing code to carry out the plan. If you're an engineer and you're not writing code on either side of meetings, you should dig deep and figure out why.
But you’re describing exactly what I mentioned above: engineers whose job is not code, per se. Yes, the super-senior engineer who cracks down on bad code by others and sets the right path, etc, is very valuable even if they’re not directly coding themselves. I’m talking about the engineers who are directly responsible for implementing features and fixing bugs. I.e., most software engineers.
Sometimes a great engineer spends a month tracking down a 3-line fix, and that’s just what happens with complex software. But by and large, if an engineer averages only a few LOC a month (and I’ve unfortunately seen this way too many times) then we probably have a problem on our hands.
The question is who’s writing the code. A core part of a senior engineer’s job is helping to train and mentor junior engineers; it’s not unusual for an entire project to be designed and led by a senior engineer and implemented by more junior engineers. Design reviews don’t result in commits, deep dives on technical implementations don’t result in commits, negotiating an architecture change between groups don’t result in commits. A large amount of the actual heavy-lifting value-add of an actually senior engineer is not in the code they’re writing.
This. Spending a productive, rewarding half a day pair programming with a receptive junior engineer who isn't sure how to approach a complex task nets them 1+ commits and you 0 commits. Spending half a day chasing after a "loose cannon" engineer who hastily committed bad code nets them 3 commits (the original bad commit, a rollback commit, and the fixed commit) and you 0 commits.
How do the individual stats look at the end of the month/quarter/Musk Layoff Review Period when these kinds of days are relatively common?
All that, in theory, would be tracked. The senior engineer would be able to point to the PRs/MRs with all the helpful comments that led to the code improvements. It wouldn't be hard to show calendar invites or whatever for pair programming sessions, which could be corroborated by asking the junior as well.
It does, however, bring up the point that one should always be mindful of what their output looks like and how easy it is to prove. I'm sure everyone has worked with a 'meeting commando', who loves to discuss edge cases and bikeshed instead of shipping code. Maybe they've carved out a nice niche doing so, and have convinced others in the company of their (dubious) value, but it shouldn't be surprising when the company is sold/acquired/RIFd that someone else might expect someone with an engineering title to have more tangible contributions to point to.
(I am not responding to the "25%" part as I did not use a percent myself, but am responding to the second, stricter, statement.)
Elsewhere in this thread, people are discussing a potentially-credible (but maybe you disagree) report on this from Gergely Orosz that does not paint this as "only the 3 senior executives".
> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.
You're missing my point. There's no use in trying to debate whether or not any one person is being fired "for cause" or not...frankly I could care less whether the one item of hearsay you point at is credible or not.
What I'm trying to wade through is the vast oceans of nonsense being fielded in the media and in comments that do not add anything to the story and are just trying to prop up one side or another. There's an ocean of difference between one item of hearsay that you point out (hell, maybe that one EM was due to be fired "for cause" who knows? do you? I sure don't!), and 25% of the workforce being fired "for cause", and 4 executives (not 3 as you point out).
There are Twitter employees tweeting out that they have been fired already. Whether it’s going to be 25% or not, it’s certainly not just outgoing executives.
And the WaPo article states: “ The first round of layoffs, led by his lawyer Alex Spiro, will target 25 percent of the workforce”
Getting rid of 25% of the company "for cause" is not going to hold up in court. They'll be treated as layoffs. I think Musk just proved this by trying the same thing at Tesla.
Ah I see now. Right we will have to see whether they’re claimed to be for-cause or not. Though the rush to fire people with a looming vesting deadline is certainly cause for suspicion.
From WP: "Layoffs are expected to begin ahead of Nov. 1, when Twitter employees are slated to receive additional compensation related to stock grants."
I think this might be the confusing part, because he's trying to claw back as much compensation as possible, maybe he's trying to avoid paying severance as well
Lawsuits are often free financing to fractional future payouts. Especially when the terms are too cush from being clubby. That's like half of Elon's call on this bet.
Every jurisdiction is different in details, of course, but "at-will" just means you can fire someone, not that you get to decide what happens after unilaterally (e.g. you may owe severance)
Is that the case in CA or NY? I don't know where else Twitter has large offices, but presumably these would be two of the largest. I'm pretty sure in CA the employer doesn't automatically owe severance. It's usually offered in return for a promise not to sue (and sometimes also a promise not to speak ill of).
There's the WARN Act, but I don't think that impacts what happens after a duly-warned layoff, unless I'm mistaken?
The California WARN Act requires companies of a certain size who are laying off 50+ employees to give 60 days notice to the employees.
Technically the company can't get around the WARN act through severance but it is essentially pre-paying the damages so there's no reason to go to court.
I wonder if even Musk would be so publicly ruthless as that?
I wonder how many his employees in Tesla/SpaceX/where ever are currently incentivised by stock options, who’d watch their boss doing that to Twitter people and wonder why they bother working evenings and weekends, if the options can be yanked as cruelly as that?
Musk made an offer, voluntarily closed off his ability to back out, then tried to back out and couldn't. He has been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Twitter's management (or outmaneuvered himself, same effect). So I'm not super high on his ability to foresee consequences at the moment.
Also, because of being outmaneuvered, he may be seeking any chance to stick his finger in the eye of the people who did it. That the logical consequences will be that his finger gets cut off... well, as I said, I'm not sold on his foresight at the moment.
I think it was a good gamble. If old management had budged by even 1% or 2% of the original deal, the savings would have easily paid for all the lawyers Musk and Twitter had to hire. Just a calculated risk that didn’t pay off. That’s how calculated risks go sometimes.
WARN Act just means you have to give people notice. You can revoke their credentials and tell them to stay home while the 60-day clock runs. You just have to keep paying them for that time.
The WARN act only means you need to give 60 days notice in certain types of mass layoffs. Given that Twitter hasnt done any mass layoffs yet, speculating on whether or not they gave enough notice under the act is a bit premature.
Twitter hasn't, but it seems that there is some internal tension around it. Making working conditions worse to force people to quit, setting impossible deadlines to fire en masse "with cause," and just generally shedding employees but not calling it a layoff all seem to be in play.
Elon is interacting and trying to dodge this act. He seems to want to cut Twitter's workforce at a scale that the WARN act covers.
>Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me
Why would this be? Musk has already signaled his lack of confidence in the previous management, why would this not extend to their hiring practices, training, HR policies, etc.?
Those being laid off for cause are the 3 senior level executives (the old CEO, the lead counsel, and the content policy head). Those 3 had a 100+ million cumulative severance package which they are now no longer eligible to receive, although none of them are strapped for cash.
Elsewhere in this thread, people are discussing a potentially-credible (but maybe you disagree) report on this from Gergely Orosz that does not paint this as "only the 3 senior executives".
> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.
I don't understand why so many people celebrate when Elon treats his underlings like trash. Is it because people hate Twitter and think if you work there you deserve this? Is it because they want to have Elon's level of power and fame where the rules don't apply to them? Something else?
Because the aggrieved aren’t satisfied only by Elon taking over twitter and taking it in a different direction, they also believe that those currently at twitter deserve harsh punishment for whatever role they had in twitter.
Also one perennial observation with authoritarian-friendly people is that in their dog-eat-dog fantasy they are the badass warlord sitting atop a pile of bones rather than the nameless goon that lies at the bottom of the bonepile.
All of the above, plus a fair bit of delusion. The amount of people I've seen pretending to be engineers in order to normalize the most ridiculous things he says or does has been growing and when pressed they often just vanish or stop responding.
That said, should Twitter eventually fall apart it will never be the fault of Musk. It will be because insiders preventing his vision, or the government blocked him, or any number of excuses.
Hasn’t it been a popular topic on here of how bloated Twitter’s staff seems to be given how little the platform has apparently changed over the years? Not taking a stance on that, I don’t know, but to that cohort of commenters this probably seems like victory for common sense.
The majority of work done by white collar people is not wildly valuable either from a cynical point of view (or realistic/truthful if you feel that way pov)
There are plenty of people who have the skills to provide value to an organization, and just want a safe/reliable payment to provide for their families in return.
Its still a sad occasion to see them fired for no/little reason.
Musk doesn't meet the cause outlined in their employment contracts. They'll get their executive early termination severance but it'll require some legal action first.
Taylor Leese is a respected Twitter engineering manager who tweeted on Sunday that he was no longer working at Twitter. While it's remotely conceivable that he quit, it's much more likely he was fired.
I had reports from friends who worked there that they were asked to stay available over the weekend, presumably for situations like this, or requests from the "war room" group that has been setup.
What is an engineering manager as it relates to actually writing code?
One of the things Elon said was that there appears to be 3 managers for every engineer. I understand the need for a few PMs but if there really was a 3:1 ratio that’s just absurd.
My understanding of Twitter is that it has, or used to have, many internal teams that do 'social media consultancy projects' for prospective clients presumably to facilitate ad campaigns. In that case I would expect everyone on those teams to have manager as a job title, much like 'director' in design firms.
There is literally no chance that Twitter has 10 engineering managers for every engineer. That is simply absurd. i worked there for over 4 years, and the ratio then was very comparable to every other tech company I've worked at, including large ones like Google and smaller ones (then) like Salesforce.
Maybe more interesting, there are a lot of roles that have "manager" in the name somehow. Product Manager is the obvious one, Program Managers exist, and I'm sure there are others, not to mention that every function has managers in one shape or form if they're at all scaled out -- there's managers for designers, lawyers, accountants, etc at a fairly predictable ratio at every company I've worked at.
Amusingly, Twitter was one of the most manager-lite companies I ever worked at when I started. In 2011 the ratio was a lot closer to 50:1 than it was 1:10.
Perhaps Musk is simply taking everyone with manager in their role and implying they're managing other people. This is not the case and is willfully misrepresenting people's work if so. Par for the course for this guy, though.
I think that at this point, taking something Elon Musk says- especially about Twitter!- as having any sort of relationship to truth is the thing that's absurd.
Does this mean that they have or deserve different rights under contract law than others do? What if their counterparty is even less "strapped for cash"?
It’s not an excuse to treat people poorly, but I certainly have less empathy for someone who has $5M in vested stock who gets fired vs someone who makes $15/hour and lives paycheck to paycheck.
Both are injustices. The former isn’t much of a risk to life. The latter could literally result in life or death situations.
Relative empathy is part of being a regular human being.
If someone has 10 lollipops and loses 1, that’s not “selective empathy” to feel differently than about someone else who has 1 lollipop and loses everything.
One job one person, the rest is all assumptions. How much they made, their stock options, financial situation. Maybe they are paying for their nephews cancer treatment or something.
Matt Levine has a good explanation (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-31/elon-m...), which is that they receive a golden parachute for a simple reason. Their self-interest was to say "la-la-la, we can't hear you" when Musk comes trying to buy Twitter. That would've given them a chance to maintain high paid positions for years. Instead, they sold to him, knowing they'd probably be given the boot.
Now, at some level, it still stinks that the CEO is getting paid so many tens of millions of dollars for less than a year's worth of work. To solve that, you'd have to cut CEO pay in the first place, because just removing the parachute would incentivize clinging to their existing paychecks.
The C suite has an incredible amount of influence to block a deal with a non-strategic acquirer like Elon. The threat of all executives resigning en masse can knee cap a business.
The senior management who were fired "for cause" are all examples of how golden parachutes are properly used, and they all performed to the highest possible standard: They delivered a full-price payout to shareholders.
The "for cause" bit is a transparently vindictive breach of contract. They will get their money and then some. In fact they may know some lawyers who know how to take Elon's money.
You also need to give two months notice, or compensate for two months time, if you're going to have a big layoff. Laying off 50% of employees is also going to add up. 3,500 employees * $20,000 = $70,000,000.
I've been through changes like this several times and the SURE indicator that big changes are coming is when the higher-ups say "Nothing will change". Seriously.
I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are engaged in wishful thinking, rather than deceit.
My guess is Musk wants to punish them for making him go through with the deal _he agreed to_. He doesn't want to own Twitter and he's making them feel it.
>He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,
> Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first
Technical people, especially engineers and those on HN, hate sign up forms but having grown a product to X thousand users, the more you push the sign up form, the more people sign up. You can even plot a linear relationship between the two, which I've done before.
This seems shortsighted. It's optimizing for what's easy to measure (sign ups) over what's hard to measure (brand, customer satisfaction, word of mouth).
Sign ups were directly correlated to revenue, at least in my case, and likely most others, such as in @joegahona's comment about publishing. That is to say, the customer satisfaction decrease in popups did not decrease revenue, and that is assuming there even was a satisfaction decrease at all; again, most technical users vastly overestimate how many people actually care about popups, most non-tech people simply click the X to make it go away, and a percentage of all visitors will sign up.
This may be true in the short term but eventually more of these decisions begin to accumulate and cause more dissatisfaction. Each one on its own has barely any impact on the bottom line, it's just one more cut among a hundred cuts. In the end you end up with a product that is overall annoying to use. And the whole time you could be going along, measuring each decision and thinking that you're doing okay and no mistakes are being made. But measuring today with yesterday is not the same as measuring today with 3 weeks ago + 13 decisions reversed, 5 decisions reversed, 1 decision reversed.
Agreed, just following data can be a dangerous path. You have to build things because they’re the right thing to build. You need a cohesive vision not scattershot A-B tests. Unless you only care about short term profit, of course.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That’s why the Facebooks die and the Apples and Googles last.
So what kind of experiment do you run to capture that dissatisfaction? Doesn’t have to be a/b. Just anything qualitative that doesn’t boil down to making decisions purely based on feelings.
Generally when running these kinds of tests you measure for further down the funnel metrics than sign ups. It's obvious sign ups would increase. In all the tests I've done around this, you look either at revenue or engagement over a longer term.
I think when you're really good at using a computer, you expect things to be easy. When you get a sign up form instead, it's extremely frustrating. We're used to it being easy to use a computer and can see that someone is making it hard for their own benefit. And then we think, if it's hard for us, it's even harder for someone without a lot of skills.
And I think that's probably true! But the person without much computer skills comes in with an expectation that stuff is gonna be hard. The egregious signup page isn't a surprise in that sense, it's just one of the many things they have to struggle with to use a computer.
An A/B then doesn't show any benefit for removing the signup page, only downside, because an A/B test only tests what happens if one feature changes. Our intuition can still be right; if we could do all the work to make it so a website is actually easy to use for someone without a lot of skills, like how Apple radically simplified the state of affairs with the iPod, that will positively defy peoples' expectations and make the app more accessible -- even if just simplifying any individual component doesn't do that.
I noticed the same thing in the world of publishing (both print and online). It's the reasons pop-ups have never gone away -- they work. It's the reason those annoying inserts in print magazines that fall in your lap have never gone away -- they work.
Yeah this is unlikely to be positive on revenue and very well might be negative. It's extremely unlikely that Twitter put that registration wall in place without extensive testing and micro-optimization. Musk is just throwing his weight around and declaring himself smarter than everyone else.
Reddit and Instagram is even worse. Besides cookie boxes (which all have different UIs and rarely a good no button) it's probably the most annoying thing on an ad-blocked internet.
How do the designers who work at these tech companies not understand that repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up? Nor incentivize others to link to it?
I think these things come about because of A/B testing. The metric being optimized is probably "app installs" or "account creations" and the negative side effects of driving a bunch of users off are not considered/measured.
I know how it happens, I've designed many a KPI. Something so fundamental and important as the default non-user first-exerpience (not just a 'signup flow') should be evaluated more holistically than just looking at numbers.
But I guess when you have layers of middle managers it's safer to point to a spreadsheet than make hard choices.
Even fucking Google keeps putting a half-page pop-up on my iPhone saying "WANT TO SIGN IN, OR JUST KEEP SEARCHING 'ANONYMOUSLY' LIKE A CHUMP?" or something just as fucking annoying.
Yea, and the annoying part about Google is that you know that they know you're user X, just not logged in. They know I am logged in to several different accounts from this IP, they know I search for similar stuff under those accounts as I do when not logged in, etc. I feel like it would be more honest for Google to write something like, "Hey, ok_dad, we know it's you, just log in so we can save your porn searches to your account properly, rather than having to do data mining on your nasty habits."
Non-technical non-users are not dissuaded, they sign up. Technical non-users using adblock aren't profitable conversions anyway, so "who cares?" is an entirely reasonable decision for the PO/PM who made it.
Considering where their revenue comes from, have you considered that they may not want people who run ad-blockers to sign up?
They'll tolerate you if you produce content to help keep the paying users engaged, but plenty of businesses choose not to pursue customers who are unlikely to generate profit.
Do you have numbers for the claim that this behavior doesn’t incentivize sign up? I’d guess that for most folks it indeed does — at some point you get annoyed enough to go through with the sign up process. These sites never log you out so it’s a one time thing. I personally am not inspired to sign up in these situations but I’d guess the numbers show that I’m in the minority.
Agreed. I've noticed instagram and reddit over the last year have really tried to squeeze the last bit of growth it can by blocking non registered visitors from using the site past a couple of clicks. I get that it's their server resources I'm using up but for some reason the way they do it just aggravates me.
> repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up?
It absolutely does, and that is precisely why they keep doing it. It doesn't work for the kinds of people that browse hackernews, but that's not their core audience anyway.
It's like saying ads don't work because you and me never click them because we use an adblock. Clearly they do work, and quite well...
When a sign-in-to-see-the-thing-you-just-searched-for shows up, I take it as a sign that the company isn't doing very well. If you've ran out of good ideas for driving growth, you start considering the bad ideas.
This is why I never touch new reddit or visit the site on mobile. It's old reddit + ublock origin on desktop and a third-party app on mobile every time.
I looked at Musk's feed and it did not appear, but just now clicked on one of the other Twitter links in this thread and got hit with it almost immediately. Maybe the change is still being rolled out? Maybe it was just a fluke? Maybe it doesn't appear on certain people's feeds for one reason or another?
Prolly not pushed to your local edge location, my version of twitter updated and it no longer shows the pop up screen yet it still shows the blue bar at the bottom of the page (which is fine imo)
I’m sure they crunched the numbers and found that the gain from targeted ads toward the people that sign up is bigger than the loss of people who don’t use Twitter because of the annoyance. Instagram is even worse for what it’s worth.
It seems inconsistent now. Sometimes I can scroll for minutes with nothing and other times I get the sign-up pop up right away. Or was it always this way?
it's gotten worse for me. i can't access it. in a browser that's always logged in, i try to visit any page on the site and get a page that says "Something went wrong, but don't fret — let's give it another shot."
the site works whenever i login via a fresh, private browser session. for a minute i thought i was blocked after muting the words "elon" and "musk"
I had that yesterday in Safari - clearing all the caches and closing every Twitter tab (I somehow had 5 open) meant that it worked when I opened a new one. Maybe something Service Worker-y? Have had that issue with the Twitter before.
So, it was a simple corporate raid after all. Welcome back to the 70s: energy markets problems, inflation, and now finally some good old corporate raiding with LBOs.
Twitter has been taken private so this is not corporate raid.
Corporate raid is aimed at making changes to the company specifically to increase share price. The idea is that the resulting share price increase covers at least significant part of the cost of getting majority stake. This makes the buyout relatively cheap or even free.
Which of course makes little sense if you are also taking the company private.
I would also like to point out that the whole point of buying a controlling stake in the company usually is to exert some control. And to buy it out completely and take it private is to exert complete control without having to explain yourself (too much).
There is, of course, possibility of the investor buying shares because they are content with current management and do not plan to interfere even after they have acquired majority stake. But this, in my experience, is quite rare.
Taking a company private via LBO, firing a quarter of the staff so you can afford the debt payments, and then streamlining and flipping the profitable parts of the business is the classic corporate raid playbook. So far he's done the LBO part, and is apparently doing the layoff part. Of course, he's the richest person in the world and his finance partners are well connected Saudis, so there are obviously many plausible reasons to operate it at a loss and never do the actual looting part of the corporate raid.
Sure. But Musk is betting that Twitter is not profitable because of the people running it. And Twitter was profitable for a while before the marked management change in late 2018.
It's not a result of bad management. Twitter is only non-profitable because they choose to spend all that excess revenue on R&D; Partly because, that's what tax law incentives, partly because that's what investors in tech companies want: Growth
If you look at twitter's own financial filings, they could easily be profitable if they just dropped their R&D budget. The filings claims in the 2021 year it only cost about $500 million to "operate" the platform, and the platform bought in over $5 billion in revenue.
All Musk is doing is switching the company priorities from growth to profit extraction.
In theory, you can drop the R&D spending to zero, and you can sit there claiming a cool 90% profit ratio. However, some of that R&D spending is probably "necessary" to the continued functioning of twitter as a platform, and it's improvement. If you dropped R&D to zero twitter (the platform) would slowly wither and die, but theoretically there is a happy medium where you can maximise for long-term profit and extract the maximum value over time (though, it still might be profitable to run the company into the ground eventually)
R&D covers all development that would qualify as more than “maintenance mode” for Twitter. It’s not necessarily a bunch of skunkworks teams making moonshot bets. It’s a very loosely defined tax category.
The dirty not so secret of “we could be profitable if we just dropped our R&D budget” is that maintaining your existing revenue depends on that new development work.
> Of course, he's the richest person in the world and his finance partners are well connected Saudis,
Care to point to your sources or are you just spreading misinformation?
Saudis are second largest shareholder in Twitter but their share is relatively slim. Also, just because Saudis bought the same thing I bought does not immediately mean they are my finance partners even if it somehow helped my goal.
Here, official Saudi statement that they are maintaining their $2bn stake in the company because it is in the long term interests of the Kingdom. So, maybe just business partners, not finance partners, although that's $2bn of cash that Musk won't have to pay out. Anyway, the substance of the point remains intact - there are many plausible reasons the current owners of twitter could want to continue operating it that are not in the classic corporate raiding plan.
Saudi finance partners were the reason he tweeted 'Funding Secured' in relation to Tesla. That's Tesla, not Twitter, but does show he has partnerships with the 'well connected Saudis'
No idea if it’ll turn out to be just a corporate raid but I’ve become so disillusioned and disgusted with nearly everything about companies like Twitter, Google, and Meta that I do not think a realistic solution exists for the problems they cause that doesn’t involve a complete change of leadership and firing a significant percentage of all of them.
I don’t care what Elon does with Twitter tbh, as long as it’s something different. Good luck to him.
Tesla doesn't show drivers ads. I hate their data collection and the fact you rent rather than own aspects (all?) of their cars, and the T&Cs (I hate them so much I wouldn't buy a Tesla, in fact), but I think ads are worse. (Plus there's plenty of competition for cars, I have a choice.)
On the other hand Musk's other companies don't seem to be as bad.
I will delay judgement on Twitter until I see what he does. There's no need to come to a strongly held conclusion about what he'll do from Twitter at this point. Everyone who's doing so is showing more about their opinions and prejudices than anything else at this point IMO.
Raids are typically distressed companies that are squeezed for every asset and sold for parts. Not buying a thriving enterprise and driving into the ground. He paid a premium for Twitter and is probably $10B in the hole already. This has to be a sincere attempt to increase profitability. Just seems like a really bad one. Conspiracy theory is that owns a wad of that Truth Social SPAC and every dollar he drains from Twitter goes there.
Elon wanted to back out and the executives finessed him masterfully. Everyone with vested shares is a recipient of a $44,000,000,000 cash infusion into the bay area economy, while media stupidly focuses on cliffs and parachutes that wont be paid.
I'm all for the European don't work unpaid overtime, but what I don't get is the sense of entitlement these people had, when they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind. "WE WILL SHOW YOU ELON" - Show what exactly? That billing and other completely standard cookiecutter SaaS features can't be implemented by other engineers for what is ultimately a near real-time messaging platform with marketing hooks.
Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.
I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.
The pitfalls of extreme comfort. You have a place like the Bay Area with near perfect weather, obscene amounts of money, and at least until relatively recently, a social environment that lorded you as a "rockstar."
You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!"
Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explosive considering large chunks of the millennial generation were already coddled—and yes, I'm a millennial). You get a bunch of entitled brats who view anyone who isn't doing what they're doing as _less than_ (which is ironic considering those "less-thans" keep the bubble they live in running—electricity, food delivery, sewage systems, etc).
Pepper in the absolutely psychotic, cult-level diatribe these people sputter about "changing the world" and "making dents" and you have a low-level Jim Jones field jamboree brewing. It's absolutely zero surprise what's come out of SV over the last decade and change.
And that doesn't even factor in the pharmaceuticals!
It isn't an entitled attitude to refuse to work over the weekend under threat of losing your job to ship a new feature that isn't actually urgent at the whims of your new CEO who has spent the last few months publicly shitting all over you.
If you're being paid $300,000 it is. Some overtime expectation in reasonable or unforeseen situations is not unusual in many places. For blue collar and minimum wage service workers it can just be a way of life.
The idea that an employee doesn't think think they need to work overtime even though the company has just changed ownership, because they think they know better than the company owner what needs to be done, view his requests as "whims", and believe that because the owner had comments and opinions about the company that singled out no engineer or manager by name that they therefore should be allowed to disregard this direction, is one of the most entitled things I've ever heard. Doubly so if they were one of the ones who had spent the past few years personally shitting all over Musk publicly.
You're correct. I think that behavior is just the flip side of what I described above (instead of entitlement in favor of comfort, entitlement in favor of abusive behavior being shrugged off as "genius at work").
Both behaviors are ignorant and exist in an altered state of reality that's long-term destructive.
Maybe throw in a landmark forum, after you failed your first startup. I've actually seen people walk past hundreds of homeless people in the mission as if they don't exist, only to sit down in a flat in the middle of them to tell your tech buddy (me) that they're changing the world with the next photo sharing app. I had a little dystopia vibe, but then again I grew up in Europe so what do I know.
Oh Lordy…I had a boss send me to a “management seminar that he found exceptional” that turned out to be that train wreck around 20 years ago. I think I lasted maybe an hour before I got up and left in the middle of the session with the speaker yelling at me to sit down (and some rude asshole trying to block me from leaving…unsuccessfully).
I called my boss and told him I left, that I didn’t care if he got a refund, and to fire me if he wanted (he didn’t).
> they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind.
I imagine that at this point, many are staying until they get fired so they can collect severance pay.
That is what I would do. I absolutely would not work for Elon’s Twitter long term unless they paid me a king’s ransom, but I would definitely stick around and jump through the hoops just long enough to get a nice payout.
You’re almost there - which systemic problems in society are creating this elysium like class system where we jeer about the battles of the ascendant elite vs the shrinking bourgeois in a city where people beg for water on the street?
"Workers" is strange to me when talking about people who make 5-10x the national average (i.e. make more than many average executives in other industries). They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion. I'm fine with including staff in retail, restaurants etc, but someone making $500k+ a year doesn't fit into that category.
> They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion.
You are (understandably) conflating "worker" with "working class", but these are different contexts. A worker is anyone who must, well, work for a living as opposed to their income coming from property/capital.
Wouldn't you differentiate between workers and executives? Is the CEO a worker if he doesn't own the company?
Tying it to the salary makes sense to me. If you get paid minimum wage, asking you to work overtime without additional pay is unjust. You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
I am not making any argument here about whether this specific incident is fair or whatever. I'm just clarifying how the word "worker" is used in the context of economic and labour theory, and where your blue-collar misunderstanding likely came from.
Yes, I am a well-paid SWE. But I must still work for my salary; my income does not come from owning capital. That's the crucial difference.
> You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
Something on fire? Sure. Regulation means this project must be done Monday? Maybe, thought I'm wondering why management didn't start it sooner. A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
New CEO sets an arbitrary deadline for no reason other than to cull the heard? Fuck that.
Executives are different because of their compensation structure. When you're being paid via stock and option grants, money being used to pay "workers" is coming directly out of your pocket, so in this way executives are naturally a different class of employee.
"I'm going to _ask_ you to go ahead and come in on Saturday and I'm also going to _ask_ you to go ahead and come in on Sunday and I'm going to keep this stapler."
Most of the national/international media has been scrutinizing Twitter all weekend, specifically looking for signs of layoffs. It seems odd that this person would have scooped them all on that? Not saying it's impossible or anything, but it does make me a little suspicious.
Not that I'd say use them as the only source but they've been a source for other layoffs for a long time and he's usually correct if not always. He's the author of a few Engineering books (The Pragmatic Engineer, etc.) so he gets a lot of inside information from current and past SWEs.
Yesterday it was "lay of 25% of workforce today to avoid paying some bonus thingie that kicks in Nov 1". Well, there's still couple of hours in which this may become true, but I don't expect it, and meanwhile I see the bonus angle has been silently dropped.
For salaried, at-will employment, the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want. There are exceptions for, like, sexual harassment and racial discrimination, but not for "I disagree with the boss about what is a realistic project timeline".
Everything in life is tradeoffs. American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money.
> American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money.
Of course, this comment is predicated on the assumption that America's loose labour laws are the reason for this salary disparity, and I'm not personally willing to follow you to that conclusion.
I think it's far more likely that American software engineers get paid more because the industry was effectively born there, and it was born there due to historical accidents like the US being where the transistor was invented, the advancement of technology due to government spending during World War II and the subsequent space race, etc, not to mention the US being the center of the VC world, which has its own deep history.
A tradeoff can exist without implying that the tradeoff is necessary.
In other words, America has A but not B, Europe has B but not A, and there doesn't happen to be a place with both A and B, but it's not impossible in principle. Workers would still need to decide if they value A or B more, even if in a perfect world they could have both.
Fair enough. I took the parent comment to be implying that that tradeoff was necessary--i.e. to have high salaries you have to have loose labour laws--as opposed to a simple statement about the current world we live in.
If it's the latter, absolutely you are right, and it is certainly the case that tech employees today are forced to make the choice between New York/California tech salaries and strong labour laws, regardless of whether or not there's a necessary inverse relationship between those two things.
If you can fire low performers, average performance will be higher, which means average pay will be higher. The risk is that you personally get mistaken for (...or correctly assessed as...) a low performer. Hence, tradeoffs.
Just because American SWEs are able to exploit the current workers paradigm in the US due to eye-watering amounts of money from VCs and the state of ad-tech doesn't mean jack shit for any at-will salaried employee that isn't paid in truck-loads of equity.
There are states in the US where teacher's unions are out-lawed. US workers don't have rights. I have a feeling you might feel differently if not part of the segment of the working class that happens to be seeing benefits atm.
Hyperbole, but ... a quick look at the Wikipedia article on Wisconsin's 2011 law [1] looks like the next best thing (e.g., yearly votes to retain union).
> Collective Bargaining: The law limits collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases cannot exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Increases from the bargaining process for teachers are applied only to the base wages, and do not include the additional salary of teachers. Contracts are limited to one year and wages frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units must take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers cannot collect union dues, and members of collective bargaining units are not required to pay them.
American software engineers * in unicorns from SV *. They have their own scale which is not really a national thing. Then you also have to adjust for the cost of living / not included insurances etc.
To offer a bit of counter-perspective, do keep in mind that while American SWEs do get paid more on the average, the costs of living in the US are also sky-high the areas where big software companies operate.
Yes, in the EU I get paid a lot less, but the cost of living in Europe is also not nearly as expensive (although we also do pay more taxes). That's not even accounting for job security or workers rights, I seem to just have more money left over each month on average than any Americans I know of in the same industry because the cost of living is just lower and I have less heavy unexpected expenses (healthcare being the big one of course, but when I hear what US SWEs need to pay just to stay housed and fed, it makes absolutely no sense in prices compared to the EU).
That's not a case of risk aversion, its a case of relative vs absolute pay. In relative pay, the EU pays their employees just straight up better. The US is only better in absolute pay, but that gets drained quickly due to the local economy scaling up to match.
Anytime you compare things anecdotally to people you know be verrry careful. It’s easy to not be comparing apples to apples. Do those people have kids? Rent vs own? How nice of cars? Commute? Sq footage of house? Etc etc. for example, I don’t work for FANG and you probably haven’t heard of my employer, but out of ~300k TC I save 48k cash + 100k stock + ~20k 401k retirement, which I think is pretty good. Tell me if you think I could do better in EU. . And while I live in suburbs of HCOL area, I’m fully remote so could move and save even more. Also remember if you own your house the money is usually not being drained it’s building into an equity nest egg. So at the end of the day the HCOL person will have more wealth even if they have to sell a house and move to use it; that arrow only goes one way (LCOL can’t sell and move to HCOL area and come out ahead).
That unemployment rate is nonsense. If you want a job that does not pay you enough to even afford a studio apartment in many locales then yes there are multiple jobs ready to take you. Hell they'll even provide you some free (candy\pens\fast food\a pat on the back) to further tempt the deal. For everyone else that unemployment rate is a mirage.
The nice thing is that this goes both ways. If you are an at-will employee you can send an email that says "I resign effective immediately" and walk away and never speak to anyone at that company ever again.
Depends on the role, the company, and the timing. A single worker in an important position leaving on the spot, dropping some critical work half-way done and taking all the context and specific knowledge with them, could easily torpedo a million dollar deal. Or, a single employee leaving could trigger a cascade, and soon you're short a whole project team.
In general, I'd say at-will still favors employers, who are in a better position to structurally mitigate the threat of a critical employee leaving, even though they often don't do so.
Employees often depend on prior employers as references and for social connections. It is rare that anyone would actually walk out without notice, as doing so would almost always hurt their careers even if that job was truly shitty (the old adage to “never burn bridges” does apply!).
Employers do not experience this same effect. Even if lots of people get laid off from a company without notice, there will almost always be people who are willing to take new jobs there.
Mainly because many companies now have policies that will only communicate three things about former employee: time employed, ending salary, and eligibility for re-hire.
You might make an assumption from the last item, but without specific details and by the time you might be confirming employment the ineligibility for rehire likely will not disqualify the candidate…especially if other former employers have you tagged as eligible.
I have not heard of any other developers needing to furnish references either. Just ask on HN or Reddit or Twitter, most devs will say they're not needed.
I'll note that a company that depends on a single employee like this has failed to plan and is already in trouble. No matter how well you treat them, your critical employees will leave. You might be able to pay them well enough to limit the risk on them taking another job (though few employers do) but even with that sooner or later they'll win the lottery, get hit by a bus, or just retire.
A business can and must hedge against critical employees leaving. It's much harder as an employee to hedge against your employer giving you the boot.
If one employee quitting takes out your whole team, the problem isn't the employee that quit. Something is seriously wrong with your working environment and the whole thing was balanced on a knife edge.
> In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.
I have a friend who several years ago who was laid off with 3 months severance. They left feeling cheerful, telling people that if they couldn't find a job in 3 months, they deserved to be fired. Fortunately it only took slightly longer than 3 months and it's something we can laugh about now. The whole "it'll be easy to find a job with this skill-set" is true right up until it's not and is a risky backup plan.
As an example to further illustrate your point, it is possible for a business to purchase key employee insurance. As an employee we do not have the same privilege.
Employees have exactly this - it's called "Unemployment Insurance". YMMV depends on which state you live in, but many states, mandate employers pay into this so that when an employee is let go, they receive compensation.
You can debate whether it's enough or fair or whatever, but insurance against unemployment does exist for employees.
It's just a nitpick and it doesn't impact GP's point all that much, but: surely employees in the US have some sort of job loss insurance - if not standalone, then attached to a mortgage or life insurance?
It's usually unemployment insurance and it's provided by the state (literally, it'll be the state the employee resides in - here's California's: https://edd.ca.gov ).
There ARE "insurance" products that will "defer your credit/mortgage payments in case of a job loss" - they are almost all universally some form of scam (or at least a very bad "insurance").
Interesting. My personal experience is with a loss of job insurance I had to buy as a condition on my mortgage, which did have somewhat reasonable terms. I also noticed options for this on life insurance, but never pursued them.
I suppose the ultimate protection a person has is savings, and it's likely more cost-effective than any form of insurance - except it's hard in practice for most people, partly because they barely have any disposable income, and partly because it requires the degree of self-control many (if not most) don't have (and the overall culture isn't encouraging it).
I think it’s the state of the employer but I’m not sure. After all that’s who is paying into the fund. At least that’s what I remember when I looked into it when I was living in a different state than my employer and things were looking precarious.
I'm out of state compared to my employer and they had to establish a "nexus" or something because I am here, which required them to do something like register as a business and withhold state tax; I assume they're paying into some sort of unemployment in my state for me. All of those things became much more important when Covid hit, but cross-border employment has been big in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, etc for a long-time, so it's a solved problem (by someone).
I was commuting across state lines at the time. Never looked deeply as I left before it became relevant and it was what it was in any case. MA would have been more than NH and I thought it would be NH but not sure why.
But the bigger point is that unemployment insurance is very little money compared to a good professional salary.
Not really. There’s unemployment insurance. But in NH for example to pick one state I’m familiar with, the maximum is $427 per week for 26 weeks. Some other states are certainly more but for someone in a high paying job it’s not much. So a max of about $11,000. I’m familiar with other insurance other than your own savings.
I’ve worked in many positions where I had unique knowledge. If the company fired me without notice, I’d have a new job within a few days.
If I quit without notice, high revenue systems could fail or not launch.
I kind of like software because of this. An individual has great value. Of course, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that fires people Willy nilly.
But for software at-will can definitely be asymmetric benefiting the employee. Software developers aren’t replaceable cogs.
It is the definition of symmetrical. Both parties can cut ties at any time without any warning.
In general employers are able to benefit from this symmetrical relationship more often though since they are only losing a small percentage of their workers while the employee is losing 100% of the income they were getting from that employeer.
Symmetry can exist on one axis but not another. Sure it's symmetrical on the "actions an entity can take axis", but when people refer to the employee/employer relationship being asymmetrical they are discussing the risk or impact axis.
This causes minimal hard to a business and zero harm to Musk's ability to afford yachts. But a very large number of employees have jobs because they need to pay rent and buy food. Losing that job is a significant change to their lives. Software engineers are more likely to have large savings that make it easier for them to say "fuck you" to their boss and leave but in general this system of at will employment is not actually balanced.
All of these relationships are two way. If they make a demand to change the expectations of working hours and work time, you say no, I won't do that. They can fire you if they don't like the relationship, but even in the US you're likely to win at least unemployment benefits.
I had a manager like this once. They won’t explicitly ask you to work on the weekends, but the deadline in combination with the workload made it obvious you would be working on the weekend and late nights. So glad I left that toxic place.
They are all exempt employees so they aren't covered by a lot of labor law, such as getting paid "overtime", etc. This is how professional, salaried employment works. Exempt employees tend to be paid very well and have great benefits though.
You can fire an employee for no reason at all since employment is "at will". Musk probably assumes a good deal of the workforce is lazy and/or incompetent and he doesn't want to pay them. So he's figuring out who to fire.
If the terminations are happening for the purpose of depriving employees of stock-related compensation they are about to earn, that may be an illegal reason. For example, you cannot let a salesperson snag a huge deal and then fire him or her to avoid paying the commission - it’s not an “at will” issue.
RSUs only vest if you are an employee the day they vest. If a salesperson wins a deal and you fire them before paying their commission that’s different since they closed the deal first.
It’s very common for companies to let individuals go before bonuses vest.
I would certainly recommend any employee in this situation to get legal counsel. Terminating an employee for the purpose of preventing them from satisfying conditions precedent to a payment is a bad-faith move that some courts will set aside.
There's no legal framework for weekends. They were originally created due to massive labor advocacy and strikes. I imagine since such advocacy has been undermined for decades it makes sense the victories the advocacy fought for are also being clawed back.
Even if the firing is legal - and California does have restrictions when a company fires a large number of people at once - arguing that it's "for cause" to withhold severance packages is going to be a lot more difficult.
For the rank and file layoffs yes, you need to have a notice period and those people will probably get severance at least equal to that much pay. But C suite executives are another matter. It’s very likely that Elon Musk received access to information after taking control that supports a for cause dismissal.
In the US, there is a fair amount of respect (in business at least) for the idea of “consent to continue the interaction can be revoked with or without cause at any time”.
I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal outside the rare edge case where there is only a single employer in a geographical region, and even that unfortunate situation should probably be remediated with a different type of government intervention.
Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?
> I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal
There is a big one: the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship, the employer clearly has more power over where things go. So it's absolutely normal to protect the employee from being asked too much, especially when said employee doesn't benefit from the overtime.
There is a big bias towards taking companies as important citizens whose needs must be catered for, but it's taking more and more importance when the actual citizens aren't listened to. It is important to put companies back to what they are: a social construct for exploiting people and make profit from their work.
It's typically held that the average employer being able to go without a worker in a given position much longer than the average worker can go without a job is what makes it uneven. Saying "no" is far riskier to one side than the other. There also tend to be large information imbalances, in practice.
> Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?
No.
Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads.
At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.
How does Twitter hold any sway whatsoever over their employees' abilities to meet basic human needs, or their access to healthcare? I think for this to hold true, you have to assume that anyone working there must have zero savings, and no other job prospects.
There's no law that says the number they give on the sign is the exact number you get on your offer letter and not some "work for us for X amount of time and get Y amount of pay increase over that time" that may (or may not) eventually reach 80k
It's not a good idea to conflate layoffs of the rank-and-file with the 3 execs that were fired "for cause". At the exec level, it's a whole different ballgame. All of these execs are multi, multi millionaires. I'd honestly be pretty shocked if they don't sue, and at least from what I know now I'd be shocked if they don't win. In exec contracts with golden parachutes, "for cause" clauses are almost always very specific and normally entail breaking the law or company policy. That is, unless these execs were sexually harassing people or stealing money, "We think you did a bad job" won't cross the "for cause" threshold.
Lol, so Musk tweets out one semi-vague private message (one that includes the word "lol"). I wouldn't take that as evidence of shit until it is discussed in court.
Not sure I trust this source. He seems to relay rumours based on second hand sources. At least from Blind, it seems like all reports of employees being fired so far is fake. Not even sure the weekend work story is true.
I’m the opposite. Never was a Musk fan but now that I see him trying to reform twitter I’m very impressed he’s willing to take so much flak for such a direly needed goal.
> After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest-paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000, according to documents viewed by The Post.
Sales people usually get commission right? So those sales people on $300k+ are probably earning Twitter way way more than that with big corporate sales
In fact, my bet is Musk will find out shortly, if not already, that Twitter’s bans made a ton of sense and were extremely pragmatic, and had nothing at all to do with politics.
You said that’s not what happened in reply to me, and I cited that it did happen. I’m just backing up my own assertions, nothing to do with you.
And they certainly banned plenty of conservatives for their views. It was just first framed as “misinformation” and then banned. Examples include Covid skepticism, Hunters laptop, and honestly a litany more.
Please show me the user who espoused a Laissez-faire trade policy or strict constructionism and was subsequently banned for that expression.
Twitter banned dangerous idiots and assholes. It's not Twitter's fault those happen to be largely conservatives.
Maybe look inward if a group you identify with keeps getting called out for being dangerously wrong and/or violent.
Edit: I'm literally staring at Ben Shapiro's Twitter feed right now, and if conservative speech were forbidden, his account would have been permanently banned back in 2008. He posted a picture of a toddler wearing a fake beard with a, "What is a woman?" sign on their chest today, and it seems like his account remains active.
It's such a disingenuous claim to say "Conservative views are censored on Twitter." when even a cursory glance at a wildly popular conservative on Twitter demonstrates the opposite.
>Please show me the user who espoused a Laissez-faire trade policy or strict constructionism and was subsequently banned for that expression.
THIS! Let me add on:
My argument any conservative who is still tolerable to debate, is this: I don't mind differing viewpoints in philosophy, or in scope of government, per se. I don't want someone banned from twitter for wanting to defund social services, or for thinking public education is a waste of money, for thinking trade unions are bad for citizens.
Hell, I'm not even opposed to allowing voices to those who say government has no right to compel people to get vaccines, however horrid the idea.
The line, and you know this matai_kolila, is when people post/repeat/retweet lies that originate out of bad science, or out of enemy nation-states, to back up their shitty ideas. Like saying the vaccine is not useful, or saying that COVID in spring of 2020 wasn't a threat, or "a litany of other things". A line exists between legitimate differences in political opinion, and outright bullshit lies, and while you can't be jailed for saying it (literal 1st amendment), private companies have no obligation to help smear the shit.
Hunter Biden’s laptop? The laptop that no one can produce, that there are no records existed, and supposedly copies of the data exist but aren’t being looked at for reasons?
Those aren’t the slam dunk arguments you seem to think they are.
Do you deny that adversary nation-states are using social media and our culture of anonymous, unfettered "speech" to promote known lies and divisions in this country?
You either deny that, or think that absolutely nothing should be done about it by social media sites or our union of the people, known as government.
Agreed. I'm excited to see what the Twitter "business" becomes under Musk's leadership.
For too long Twitter has flirted with being a public utility and not a company.
For sure it will be a hard time for the current team - both those that stay and those that go as it is with any significant change.
Now I agree twitter is deeply flawed but there is no guarantee that a changed twitter will be better twitter. Especially I would say when it’s directed by someone who shows such little regard for law and responsibilities.
I still have a lot of respect for Musk as bold business exec. But my respect for him as a person dropped to near-zero when he promoted the baseless conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi.
The context seems to be he replied to Hillary with a conspiracy theory source that previously claimed she was replaced by a body double after 9/11 and other crazy stuff. Not sure where that is making things better.
Is there context beyond the "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye" tweet he posted? I think if that's the only context reasonably you can interpret that a number of ways: it responding to a dubious claim with a dubious claim is not the only way.
At the level of Elon Musk's influence, if something you can say is so uncertain that there is an uncharitable interpretation you can drive a truck through, I think that arguing that he meant it the charitable way is kind of meaningless when it's just as easy for people to interpret it as his support for the conspiracy theory.
We don't live in Elon Musk's head and someone, at a personal level, can choose to take it as the GP's interpretation, but I think "Context is important" doesn't make sense at all when we all have the same context with different possible interpretations.
You're preaching to the choir. I wish he'd think a bit more before tweeting, because I know what he says can have consequences.
However, that doesn't mean I have to interpret his tweets in the worst possible way, or that I can't remind other people of basic principles of civility.
I'm constantly shocked that "leveraged buyouts" are a thing. It seems like taking a business and loading it up with debt is a recipe for failure that would introduce a lot of risk for the lender, but banks and other capital holders continue issuing the debt.
I cannot fathom it either. First I heard that it was a thing was when the Glazers borrowed money to buy Manchester United then saddled them with half of the debt. They had no debt prior to being purchased. I don't know how common it is, but it feels like you're telegraphing that you're going to use the organization you bought as a piggy bank or a plaything. Like, see this shit (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glazer_ownership_of_Manchester...)
From 2016, the Glazers paid themselves annual dividends from the club, at over
£20 million every year from 2016 to 2020. In that same period, the club's debt
repayments "all but ceased", described The Daily Telegraph, while interest
payments continued. While paying dividends was common in business,
Manchester United were the sole Premier League club to "pay regular
dividends of any kind", reported The Daily Telegraph in May 2021
I don't even like Man Utd, but that's shady as hell
> constantly shocked that "leveraged buyouts" are a thing
LBOs were a cure to the poison of the post-war conglomerate [1]. Those were run as personal fiefdoms by aloof executives and their cronies.
The traditional check was M&A. Conglomerates having no clean competitors, this–in practice–meant a buyer putting up cash and borrowing the rest, buying the company, taking out a loan in the company's name, using that to pay themselves and then paying back the personal loan. The only purpose the buyer's credit served was to gatekeep. LBOs compress that process, letting anyone challenge management if they can convince investors/lenders to back their vision.
I'm guessing you hear a lot more about the failures/impending failures in LBO financing than you do the successes/non-defaults. You could calculate the implied probability of default from the POV of the lender by comparing the financing terms to "assumed risk free" treasuries, and then compare that with the historical data to see how accurate they are at pricing that risk. If you'd rather not do that work, I'm sure there's plenty of papers in the academic literature examining that exact question.
They have a place and can be used effectively to solve actual problems. Old line businesses with too many units and complicated business arrangements can actually benefit from being torn apart and rebuilt effectively.
The problem is, when the Fed gives out exceptionally cheap interest, it makes it incredibly easy to apply this strategy even when the underlying business would not benefit from it.
It's not intended for the business to continue operating after a leveraged buyout. Leveraged buyouts are typically used where the company has assets that aren't "productive" or is made up of more-or-less independent units that are worth more separate than together.
In these cases, cutting expenses by firing people is usually the first step, since the business' revenue stream can usually continue on autopilot for a while.
I expect Twitter to report record-breaking profits next quarter and Twitter's share price to go up accordingly. Maybe even enough to fill in some of Musk's hole.
Because they expect that debt to be inflated away as the currency its denominated in goes to zero (and they know they'll get replenished with cash when they need it via the Fed [1][2]).
It might be arbitrary and pure speculation but with ~7500 employees (3000 of which are engineers) I think they'll be able to do just fine with 5000. -25% of staff would just mean going back to 2019 staff levels...
I remember it was a common meme on HN to ask what Twitter's thousands of employees did all day, even back in 2015. So maybe I'm falling into that trap. But I do still wonder.
for 2021, 1.2 billion was spent on R&D, 1.7 billion on cost of revenue (guessing a decent amount of this was salaries), and 765 million was due to a class action lawsuit they lost. With all of these, they showed a loss of 200 million. There definitely appears to be some fat that can be trimmed.
This year is on track for a gain, but they sold some ad service for a billion which distorts things.
Is the billion in debt payments actually confirmed? That would most likely require some increase in revenue which is probably why Musk is looking into the verified twitter payment thing.
Your number might be something other than cash flow. IIRC Twitter has net negative cash flow and about $4B in existing long term debt prior to the new debt financing of the acquisition.
The debt financing burden is a further burden on Musk: twitter generates no free cash flow. Musk has to pay the creditors, and his co-investors are not likely to put in more cash. Musk and every other investor bought-in to a deal that now would be valued at about half what they paid. Depending on how the debt is secured, this also means twice the percentage of the company's value is now encumbered by that debt. That means that if Twitter were sold today the equity investors could lose nearly their entire investment.
Even a lousy LBO would be of a company you can asset-strip to reduce the debt. What could Twitter sell? The financing really does not make sense.
$1 billion across 5000 employees is just $200,000 each. I suspect if you add total comp plus expenses for each employee you get to $200,000 pretty quickly.
Saw a note today they're going to layoff a number of "highly compensated" sales people highlighting that they made even more than very senior engineers... which is an interesting plan for a company trying to salvage revenue.
Anyone that has revenue has salespeople. Twitter’s (and every tech company’s) sales staff convince large companies to spend money paying for Twitter ads. A good salesperson will be mostly paid on commission for bringing huge clients who spend millions of dollars per year on advertising. Their comp is high specifically because they can sell many multiples of that comp.
A salesperson that has the ability to call the head of an advertising agency and get them to answer the phone is maybe the most valuable possible employee in any ad-supported business.
I'm being pedantic just for clarification but not everyone that has revenue has salespeople. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're implying a lot of companies you might think wouldn't have salespeople do in fact have them.
Pardon me, but isn't this the standard operating procedure for leveraged buyouts of "inefficient" businesses?
Cut expenses to the bone, resulting in a higher profit margin on the same revenue, coast on that revenue while dismembering the business for anything valuable, and then load any transferable debt to the carcass and declare bankruptcy?
Interesting idea. But, wouldn't that be competing with TikTok? And, Vine hasn't been a thing in what, 6 years? That's not so much "bringing back" as developing something new.
Yep, literally every company that ever buys another company look to streamline it. In every single case where they say 'no layoffs planned,' just means they are waiting until they actually own the company and do the research to decide when layoffs will be.
it's not apples to apples but the other energy firms did the same to Enron employees when they were walking out with their boxes of stuff. iirc HR departments in competing firms put out gleeful notices that former Enron employees would not be considered for open positions. Everyone loves to point and laugh when someone a tick up on the perceived totem pole falls down a few notches.
Can't blame them honestly. There was that Project Veritas video where they talked to some employees and they don't even hide how big of assholes they are.
The video was posted by a remote financial analyst who was visiting the SF office for the first time. She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time. The perks are nice, maybe too nice you could argue, but the notion that the video proves she (and other Twitter workers) don't do any "real work" is idiotic. It's a short video, a tiny sample of her work day -- why would she dedicate any portion of it to showing her crunching numbers in Excel or whatever?
Ouch, that's a pretty horrific video. I don't know if that kind of thing goes down well in the "influencer" or the SV tech scenes, but outside those bubbles it's clearly going to come across as narcissistic, entitled, and lazy. Which is unfortunate because I'm sure she's a wonderful person and a hard and competent worker, but there's a serious lack of judgement making that public.
She is shown scheduling a 30 minute meeting which seems to be the only work done before getting ready for lunch. After lunch plays foosball and meditation and exploring. Now that might be entirely reasonable if she comes to work at 11am and leaves in the evening or clocks back on to do some work at night, or did a bunch of other work before lunch. And having a lot of meetings is what happens when you're a remote worker who comes into the office once a year. None of that comes across to in the video though so what it actually looks like is about 3 hours of meetings (which are mostly taking pictures of one another), and the rest of it lounging around eating and drinking and unwinding.
This is not the first time a twitter employee has implied a light work schedule. There were posts when the first Elon buyout rumor came around about twitter employee reporting remote work amounting to around 30 hours a week..
This just adds fuel to the fire that for the most part Twitter has a bunch of part time employee getting very high full time wages.
Now there is a large segment of the population that believe 32 hour work weeks should be standard, if your one of those then I suppose their posts will not spark much respond, but for most people that will spark strong negative emotions.
> She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time.
then it should not be labeled as "a day in the life"
Watching the video the person comes away with an impression this is more than just 1 hour of the day. I also suspect you are giving this person far too much credit for the amount of work they did that day. I am guessing it was more like 1 hour of real work, couple hours of meetings, and the rest socializing / using the "amenities"
> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next
Part of me hopes he does, because that's the only way the Tall Poppy Syndrome folks have any chance of learning. But most of me has more empathy than they do.
The Tall Poppy Syndrome folks are not those at Twitter. I know a few, and respect them, and have no problem with them making more than most (as I did myself when I worked at FB). No, the TPS folks are those right here bashing Twitter employees, as you yourself complained about. I don't know who they are, but I do know how they act because they're acting out right here in front of us.
> The ONLY bad guys in this scenario are Musk and his yes-men
So you no longer have a problem with the haters? What changed in the last two hours?
1. Twitter, the core application, is literally a weekend junior dev project. The only engineers on the payroll who provide actual value, out of THOUSANDS, are those who scale the application and infrastructure. The vast majority of these people have been paid huge comp packages for doing effectively nothing. Sure, there are auxilliary applications like the ad platform, business intelligence, etc, but there is no world in which you need the enormous engineering staff they have to build or run these. Most of these people are useless.
2. Twitter employees have been complicit in curbing free speech, in a highly partisan manner, for years now.
> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next
I suspect that if you provide actual, tangible value and you're not actively silencing people for using the wrong pronouns, you'll be safe.
How is broadly laying off 25% of the org ever going to have the precision of pointed firings for excessive pronoun use? Even real-value is hard to measure at that scale.
Key Provision: "Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. ...."
Penalties for Violation: "A possible civil penalty of $500 a day for each day of violation. Employees may receive back pay to be paid at employee’s final rate or 3 year average rate of compensation, whichever is higher."
Doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle. From some Googling:
"Employers who fail to provide notification must provide their laid-off employees with back pay and benefits for the period of the violation (which means the amount of time by which their advance notice fell short of 60 days)."
The value of ripping off the Band-Aid could easily be worth two months of severance in his mind.
My understanding is that this was a take private so all stock was acquired already (ie vested options get paid and unvested get terminated at Close).
This is exactly what would happen if you acquired our company. It’s not like a purchaser would have the honor long term vesting schedules. They bought everything already that was available to be sold. Those who didn’t vest were dragged along into the deal.
Usually, the RSUs are converted to cash and the RSUs schedule is kept the same. The workers which remain int he company receive cash on the same schedule.Hence Letting some people go before the RSU date saves money.
> This is exactly what would happen if you acquired our company.
That is a terrible deal. I've worked at a company where all outstanding RSUs would vest immediately at the time of purchase; was that an unusual arrangement?
The layoffs, if any, haven’t even been announced yet and the only sources in the article are anonymous sources who can’t agree with each other about the supposed impending layoff.
I don’t see any reason to suspect they’re going to somehow violate the law and cost themselves additional fines if or when they do it. This is just about speculation about what Musk will eventually do.
The reason they want to lay off today is to avoid the stock grants, so it comes down which $$ was bigger. And honestly they were likely planning for severance anyways...
I was laid off from another company under a warn notice in NY and I went home the first day and kept getting paid with full benefits for 3 months. I then got a redundancy payment. It was under the condition I couldn't work for another company.
My understanding is that the WARN notice does not apply when employees are terminated for cause. This has the extra "benefit" of not having to pay out unemployment claims.
For legal purposes, a separation letter for a for-cause termination must state the specific "cause" for which the employee is terminated.
Termination on the basis of poor performance (legally, "incompetence") requires supporting documentation, such as written reviews of the employees' performance prior to the termination. And legally incompetence only tests the employee's performance at tasks actually within their job description; an employee can't be fired for incompetence at other tasks. Very importantly, a new boss coming in and deciding that employees weren't performing up to his arbitrary (and new) standards doesn't pass muster.
A mass layoff for "performance" reasons has never been sustained by a labor department. The penalty is $500 for each day of violation (meaning each day short of the 60 required by the Warn ACT), plus all salary and bonuses that would have been paid during the 60 day period, plus legal fees incurred by the employees to protect their rights.
Additionally, a "for cause" termination on performance (or any other grounds) opens the employer up to per se libel lawsuits. Literally, all the employee has to do is submit a copy of the termination letter into evidence and they win unless Twitterlon can demonstrate that the employee was actually incompetent.
Considering breaking the law is one of Musk's seemingly favorite hobbies, I wouldn't be so sure on a WARN notice. The punishments for non-compliance isn't very much.
There are rarely laws that say you may not kill another person. There are typically laws that lay out the consequences if you are found guilty of murdering someone, through a designation (eg if it's a felony offense, and what type of felony).
Whether you're guilty of murder or not is of course established after the fact. And you can do nothing wrong in the act of killing someone and still get screwed by a jury. Just ask the political left what they think of Kyle Rittenhouse being innocent.
You can certainly follow the law and go to jail regardless.
Given that none of this is official, and there are at minimum 3 different reports about the quantity and timeline of layoffs I dont think anyone is concerned about a WARN notification
I beat even Elon, at this moment, does not have a full accounting of what the layoffs will be. This is all just pure media hype and nonsense with very little basis in truth or reality
> Another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters last week said the total number of layoffs is likely to be closer to 50 percent.
Unless I’m missing something, the only sources for this article are a mix of speculation and anonymous sources who can’t even agree with each other about the layoff.
There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet).
When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters", you need to translate it to something more like the following:
The journalist who wrote this has found a credible source, who has insider knowledge.
That source has requested anonymity, and the journalist finds that request credible.
The journalist then used their skills and experience in writing about this area over the course of their career to evaluate if that source was trustworthy. They also considered if the source had their own motivations which could affect what information they chose to share and why.
The journalist may have then cross-checked that information against other sources of information to help evaluate its credibility. This becomes more important the more high stakes the claim in question becomes.
An editor (and potentially even separate fact checkers) evaluated the statement as well, and applied judgement as to whether it held up firmly enough to be published.
There are so many phrases like this in top-tier journalism. When an experienced journalist reads an article from someone else that says "a senior official in the administration said..." they can often narrow that down to just a dozen or so potential people, based on their knowledge of that beat.
As a non-journalist reading newspapers this is pretty infuriating, because there's this whole language that you need to know about in order to fully understand what's being communicated here.
On the flip side, I believe everyone understands what you wrote. But it requires faith that the author and editors are writing in good faith, which has been decreasing for a long time.
Click bait headlines, stories with weak fact checking or even printing outright lies has decreased (at least my) trust in news articles and has resulted in me questioning facts and anonymous quotes more frequently(which may be a good thing).
They don't have to make up a source to be taken for a ride. Look at CNBC eating up the story about two guys (Ligma and Johnson) who were supposedly fired. If the source is anonymous we can't check they worked at Twitter.
Generally more than one person is checking employment documents on published news stories (not tweets). Not saying it never happens but it just doesn't happen with enough regularity to assume every anonymous source is fake.
Also, fairly reputable sources that produce mostly good quality journalism will slip in misinformation or hit pieces at the behest of political and corporate entities.
Examples are the New York Times writing a hit piece against Tesla, where it turned out they had driven the car in circles in a parking lot for hours to get the battery to run out, but didn't think that Tesla might be able to get data on what they did. Turns out the author of the article works for the oil industry. The NYT also regularly publishes as fact things told to them by the Pentagon and three letter agencies, rather than calling the information alleged.
I don't believe this at all. I think there's different tiers of journalism. One tier is going to publish "anonymous person says X" and that tier will be fast, sensational, and less accurate. Another tier is going to publish experts on the record and that tier is going to be slower, boring, and more accurate.
My perception of recent news tends is that sources that were in the accurate/quality tier are shifting to the fast/anonymous tier. In the short term their reputation plus speed and sensationalism will make them seem like the best of both worlds. In the long run people will just recalibrate their opinions of previously esteemed sources.
There absolutely are different tiers of journalism - but that's about quality and reputation of publication.
The Washington Post and the New Yorker have higher editorial standards than Fox News.
There are important stories for which it simply isn't possible to get an expert to go on the record, for all kinds of reasons.
What's going on inside Twitter right now is a great example. Anyone who leaks details with their name attached to them will clearly get fired, or sued, or both.
That's why good journalists quote anonymous sources. If they could get a reputable source to go on record instead they would obviously do so!
This makes it extremely easy to make low quality content that looks just like high quality content, with the only difference being that it's more likely to be found out to be wrong information. And it doesn't seem like we can reliably punish news organizations for constantly putting out bad news, so what's their motivation to do the high quality version?
I could believe you, but unfortunately journalists have trashed their credibility with their turn to "moral clarity" post-Trump. With the effective merger of the opinion and news beats in this era, "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters" could refer to anybody at all with a grudge against Musk, and we as readers would have no way of knowing which of the cases it is if the source's motivations align with WP's editor's motivations (to denigrate Musk). This report is from a paper that still employs Taylor Lorenz as a "columnist covering technology and online culture" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/), when her main beat is more about being the moral enforcer of the progressive media's opinions on tech, online culture, trans issues, etc.
Every reporter I have ever met (and this especially includes those that went to j-school) at this point just regurgitates press releases or is too scared to bite the hand (or the hands of the golfing buddies, or the advertisers) that signs their paychecks.
Weird, my experience is the opposite. All journalists I met in person and spoke to have been critical towards anything in any way reasonable. Including their bosses and institutions. It's a merit of journalism for introspection to be normal and wanted.
WaPo isn't the best of new reporting agencies [0], but it's certainly not the worst. They do have standards and they don't make up the large majority of their data. Meaning, they have actually talked to someone that is 'familiar' with the 'deal' at some point 'last week.' It's not pure speculation on WaPo's part, though it maybe pure-unrefined-grade-A speculation on the contact's part.
If I had to bet, and many HNers out there are currently in that seat, then I'd bet on their reporting over other forms of pure speculation.
Yeah, insiders not knowing the full details of Musk's plan because Musk doesn't have a detailed plan yet seems more likely than WaPo just making some stuff up.
As a casual observer, it appears that he moves very, very quickly. An insider might have read his mind yesterday but not be familiar with his current plan being executed today. Of course this can lead to big results in some cases and erratic chaos in others.
Honestly, that isn't a super convincing source. Every news outlet has a criticism section. For an almost 150 year old organization, that is pretty sparse. Even better some of things in there are non-issues like "Trump repeatedly railed against The Washington Post on his Twitter account." Who didn't he tweet "fake news" at?
News agencies are organizations made of humans that have flaws and we should always treat with a critical eye. But we shouldn't just dismiss one out of hand as not one of the best because of the existence of a "Criticism and controversies" section on Wikipedia especially when it is FAR tamer than many mainstream competitors.
What you say is true, but you seem to be slightly missing the point of the comment you're responding to. That comment didn't say "WaPo is trash, should not be believed." It says "WaPo is neither perfect or terrible, and the information in this article is most likely somewhat accurate"
What is the bar for "familiar with the discussions"? I read a news article about it, does that make me familiar? Does the person setting up the conference room count as familiar?
Numerous employees - how much insight does a web developer at Twitter have into the inner workings of the management shift happening right now?
Photos of what? The conference room? Are we going to pull in a body language expert to analyze what Elon was saying by walking into the room with sneakers instead of dress shoes?
There is no accountability for sources in journalism, and it's why I think it's 99% useless garbage and never read it. Journalists and publications find the sources they want to tell the story they already planned to write regardless of reality.
Can verify that Twitter is laying people off. Several contacts at Twitter were laid off this weekend and hoping they I could submit their resumes to my current employer.
They were told that these were performance based terminations, despite not receiving any negative evaluations during their time at Twitter. They were also told they needed to sign NDAs in order to receive any severance.
twitter could invoke the "faltering company" exemption given that its now saddled with many $B LBO debt, or unexpected contracts loss given that some advertisers are pausing spend.
Not only an NDA - many companies also require you to sign anti-disparagement clauses, meaning you can have severance clawed back if you speak negatively of the company.
Something like that would never hold up in court, in fact it might even make the whole firing illegal in the first place. Unless, of course, so NDA's would also prevent the employer from speaking negatively about the employee, but those are extremely rare.
You might be right but a lot of this stuff is based on the calculation that most people do not have the assets to wage a lengthy legal battle when they’re newly unemployed. I’ve heard a lot of stories about wildly illegal things which either went completely unchallenged or became moot because the company went busy with no assets.
Do you have any reliable source for this? as it's fairly common in the industry. I know lots of things are common that turn out to be illegal, but this one is ripe to be tested time and again, and the fact that it's still being used implies that those challenges failed.
Just realized, but to late to edit, that I based my original comment on my home country. And that is not the US. Over here, even hardcore PIPs are regularly thrown out by courts as grounds for termination.
Sometimes, or that could be a partial reason as a signal to current and future employees about what management is like.
But NDA is another reason, or even keeping unemployment insurance premiums low by having everyone that accepts severance state that they are voluntarily leaving the company in exchange for the severance.
By voluntarily separating, they cannot collect unemployment benefits from the state, which means the state charged the employer less in unemployment insurance premiums.
Yes, good will sometimes. Other times it may be all about giving someone a very strong incentive to play nice while they find a new gig. Sometimes people basically need it.
These kinds of things are not always about the strict minimum cost actions. In general, it is a better world with some degree of human consideration being part of things.
I am quite sure many of the cases I had involvement in could have been done cheaper. However, I am also quite sure the people involved had what they need to get through to their next gig with few worries too.
That is worth a lot and these days one can never know who may be working for or with who.
Yes. It makes it easier for them to hire down the road. If you know there is a parachute waiting for you, it’s easier to take a risk on joining the company once it starts growing again.
But I suspect it’s mainly as a carrot to sign the NDA/non-compete/whatever else they want you to sign to keep not talk about what happened.
Usually it is advantageous to offer it so that you don't sue them down the road and get more money. A lot of times it is less rewarding to take the first second or third settlement offer than to counter for quadruple what they offer.
The one time I was laid off I had to sign an NDA and a non-compete to get severance. I signed it because it was a decent severance package, and the company was going bankrupt and I figured there would not be any entity left that would care or try to enforce it.
Not generally. There's no federal severance requirement. I think there might be a few states that require some kind of severance pay under some circumstances, but it's at least not common in the US.
Tweeps are being told these are performance-related terminations, not layoffs. It was posited that "performance" was referring to Twitter, not the employee. I simply pointed out that's exactly what a layoff was, and performance in this context can only mean the employee, not the company.
Well to be honest, Musk and his team looked at quantity/quality of code produced in the last 60 days, with hopefully a 10 minute chance to defend their lack of quantity/quality.
Lots of coasters in big companies can get with good rating just be being on the good side of manager/peers and even get Bonus points if you are vocal about DEI and activism.
If some random group of people who don't know me, don't know my labor or my legacy at an organization, don't know my technical abilities, etc. fired me based off the quantity (and subjective quality) of code I produced in the last 60 days, even with 10 minutes to defend myself, I would be spitting mad at the disrespect and dehumanization. Particularly if I know I was being fired days before a stock refresh.
No, this is pissing on people and claiming it's raining.
He had them print off their last 30-60 days of git commits and called himself a "hardcore coder" in DM's with Parag I really doubt he's qualified to comment on the existing infrastructure behind Twitter.
He's a really good marketer, a good businessman but I do not think he knows what he is doing when he requests access to the codebase behind a massively distributed and scalable system such as Twitters backend
Sometimes people have their own motives and don't always tell you the truth or at least omit to tell you their plans. As a co-worker once told me, welcome to the mud pit along with everyone else you'll be a competitor with while trying to build a career and hopefully a decent product.
Are you disagreeing that layoffs are happening at twitter? Elon told investors it would happen, and he needs to increase profit by $1.5B to stop losing money. Layoffs are guaranteed. The question is will it be 25% as reported or 75% as Elon promised. The answer is we can’t know because nobody knows. It’ll probably something in between.
I am disagreeing that they have happened, or that news sources have any accurate or reportable info on what will happen
They have a bunch of rumors, and panicked employees as "sources" none of which are likely in a position to know anything with any degree of certainty and it is widely irresponsible to report on it as if it was factual
This is mainly media workers exploiting current events for traffic, even if their content is misleading. We really need to sort out media corruption and incompetence.
Did a quick search of Elon + Twitter. Everything they reported seems factual and tied to things that actually happened? If Twitter does lay off a large amount of people will you admit that Washington Post probably had good sources or continue to be continually skeptical?
I think part of wanting a good media atmosphere is rewarding news sources that are shown to be reliable - and I would argue Washington Post is close to that.
Personal email, obviously. Never discuss anything of this nature on any communication medium that is owned by your employer. There's a reason "Direct Message" labeling overtook "Private Message" in chat apps.
Depending upon how sensitive I’d generally try to avoid written communications in general. It’s easy for even well-meaning friends, current or ex-workers to forward something without thinking it through.
The precursor was this recent WaPo article Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said [1] which hinted at the cuts.
Not sure what Musk's intentions are with this. Normally this will lead to the best people updating their resumes and switching over to less toxic places ASAP. You are left with people who are attached to their ancient code or who can't find good jobs elsewhere.
> Normally this will lead to the best people updating their resumes and switching over to less toxic places ASAP
Potentially, but not necessarily. Some high performers may reasonably think "finally someone who is going to cut through all the bullshit in this bloated company and demand some accountability". Look through some of the stories when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple; it wasn't that dissimilar.
Now, that said, folks like this usually want and demand an inspiring leader. Some may think Musk fits the bill for that (I think I probably would have years ago), but these days I usually just want him to STFU with so much of the bullshit nonsense he sends out. I mean, the day after he closed the Twitter deal he tweeted a blatantly ridiculous and libelous story about Paul Pelosi - it's just more of the same stupid shit from him.
I think in general because companies find it very difficult to actually be able to tell who is lazy vs. effective. This is especially true if you want to do it at scale and quickly.
The alternative is to take a measured approach to learning about the business and org, in order to make informed decisions about how to restructure efficiently. But of course that takes time and effort. For somebody impetuous and self-indulgent, it's much more satisfying to go in swinging a machete on day one.
So is you issue not that he's laying off all these people, but just the speed that he's doing this? Or to put it another way, let's say that he took a year and really studied Twitter and then came to the same conclusion and did the same layoffs, would you have an issue with it then?
If Elon or anyone else actually has strong reason to believe that certain employees are dead weight I'm fine with them being laid off. Given the speed and general dysfunction of this particular case there's basically no chance that's what is going on here.
Exactly. If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore. Even if you fire them, that's a surefire way of making sure that the best 5% of people leave the company anyways do to the depressing atmosphere this creates.
> If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore.
This would assume that the previous management had an incentive to cut costs and remove 50% of their workforce... which is probably not the case at all.
Says who? The Twitter board of directors didn't own a lot of shares to begin with. The C-suite (as we now know) had a golden parachute which means he's going to get paid millions as long as he kept the status quo.
What makes you think that previous management needlessly employed unproductive workers when they could have easily not done so? Do you think that Elon Musk has some special magic insight that makes him get the same amount of work done with half the resources? I know some people at Twitter and some people at Musk's companies and I don't think they are fundamentally run differently.
>What makes you think that previous management needlessly employed unproductive workers when they could have easily not done so?
They probably don't know who the unproductive ones are anymore because without a fresh look at things they can't think about it objectively. They give tasks to people and they get done at the same speed as they've always been done with. How do you suddenly decide: Hey actually guys, I know we were working like this for 6 years but actually, we should be 40% faster on every single task so... you know.. start working faster please and everyone who doesn't gets fired.
It's just not realistic for existing managers to do this for so many reasons. Unless absolutely forced by financial realities which was apparently never the case for Twitter.
I'm absolutely not saying anything related to Musk, at all?
Your original comment stated: "If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore."
Therefore you, not I, implied that there are relatively unproductive workers at Twitter (not unreasonable, of course - there's always going to be a performance spectrum) - and you suggested that the previous management would have removed them if there was an easy way to identify them.
This is what I was disagreeing with - your premise that the previous management would have removed their most unproductive 50% if there was an easy way to identify them.
As you might have noticed, it is quite painful to fire people, and if you have a public profile (as most CEOs of large corps usually do), you get a reputation hit for being ruthless and all that stuff.
Previous management at Twitter didn't own a significant percentage of the company shares. Why be the "bad guy" when the paychecks are still rolling in? But when it's your "own money" at stake, you get much more motivated to cut unnecessary costs. Even if that makes lots of people on the Internet hate you.
My experience is that most companies are pretty averse to firing people in general, even in the US with at-will employment, and even when there are many people who are moderately incompetent (so long as they are not posing obvious risks to the company, e.g. sexual harassment, etc.).
> The company has yet to release a formal announcement of the acquisition. The communications department has gone silent. Rumors have swirled about layoffs, with some notices going out quietly.
Is it just me or is this headline totally misleading?
Why is the headline misleading? You don't need a formal announcement for something to be news. Particularly since the formal announcement being referred to there is just the announcement that Twitter was acquired by Musk.
> ...according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved.
Given everything over the last decade, people should not trust anything when it involves a) highly controversial/partisan/breathless news and b) dealing in anonymous sources and rumors.
I think we can rely on peoples' own smarts to build in that skepticism. There's not a lot of benefit to qualifying every piece of information to say that it might be wrong.
It comes down to, do you trust that WaPo properly vetted the sources, and do you believe that the sources, whether they were in a position to be credible or not, were acting on solid information?
E.g. according to Business Insider Facebook should have fired half the company, according to “sources”, but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge yet
Asking sources to publish their name is a very sure way to not have sources at all.
Quote Orwell, Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. You need to get people to tell you about all those things, and as that someone who dislike them being printed has power (it ain't news otherwise,) you need to find a way to make people talk to you. "Help me to rekt your career and life" just don't cut it.
I understand that, and maybe the activists pretending to be journalists should have thought about that before burning the public's trust by just taking any sensationalized "source" with no vetting and reporting on it as fact.
The "media" did this to themselves, now at this point no one would trust any news story that is only validated with "anonymous sources" as the media has proven they are either incapable of vetting these sources for truthful info, or do not actually have any sources at all and are just making shit up for the clicks
Either way they have given the public no reason to trust them at this point
It's amazing how people still trust these "according to people familiar with x" articles after the past 5+ years. Like 99% of them have been wrong and just used to push a political agenda.
We've changed the title to what the article says now. I don't know whether WaPo changed their own title or the submitted title was editorializing (the latter is against the HN guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
“Twitter plans to lay off…” would probably be a more precise headline, yes. It’s more than speculation, though, but you do have to trust the reporters on that.
Yeah it would be horrible if one day we had a press like that. In this case I expect they simply didn’t have enough moveable type to include “Rumor:” at the start of the headline
It's a rumour if you hear it from a friend of a friend. It sounds like they have several credible sources. Whether you trust their vetting of what constitutes a "credible source" is another matter.
It’s reporting on information the authors received from sources who would not speak on the record. It’s entirely possible that the four anonymous sources are the four people in the meeting (Musk et al) and they’re speaking on background because they haven’t made a formal announcement yet.
Would anything let him change the deal at this point? Even if Twitter was hiding their bot problem Elon's initial offer waived his ability to do due diligence on this, no?
He's a vindictive little man, even if he is stuck with Twitter at the price he paid, he probably wants revenge.
Any evidence about information he didn't see will be fair game to claim witholding information from the court. And maybe a sec fraud indictment against those that were at the helm of Twitter.
He wouldn't be able to change the deal, but a lawsuit against the previous board/executives is possible.
The entire waiving of due diligence thing is also such a weird talking point. There was no contingency on due diligence, but part of the deal did include access to the information he would need to do it and any incorrect information in public filings should have been enough to get out of the deal.
If I were Elon there is zero chance I’d be able to resist name-searching myself in the company Slack, just in public channels and channels I was added to. I can’t blame him for that.
Tweeting it out, well. I could resist that urge just fine.
At least in a dev situation I think 10-1 devs-to-managers is actually a pretty sizable ratio - I think ideally it's more of a 6-to-8ish to one.
Now, this of course assumes that engineering managers are not solely doing employee management but also are serving some "tech lead" type roles. I.e. even if an engineering manager isn't coding I think it's essential that (a) a considerable portion of their time is spent doing code reviews, (b) they should be working closely with product managers to define stories and requirements before the dev team starts implementing, etc.
That is, having line engineering managers solely do "people management" is universally a bad idea in my opinion. They should be getting their "hands dirty" in the tech aspects as well in order to be effective.
Isn't this another version of Chesterton's fence - lots of people may seem like they serve no apparent role, until they are gone. This is not to say there aren't some that in fact do serve no role, but careful consideration is required to determine who is who imho.
Sometimes those people change the work processes in a way to make their role important.. Need printer paper? You have to go through the old lady in the 3rd floor office, because noone else can order, store or give out office supplies, not even the office next door, where you can get ethernet cables and headsets.
Yikes, I did read it wrong! OK, that would be insane, but I'm still curious if (a) that's not a pretty gross exaggeration or (b) if there some sort of job titling that's making the ratios look weird, e.g. "product manager" doesn't actually manage any people, or the way everyone who works in a bank is a "VP".
That’s not subjective. That is a manager. If someone reports to you and you are responsible for them, you’re their manager, regardless of job title. Subjective is if he’s counting program/product managers, account managers, etc.
10 managers per coder seems a bit extreme. However, 3 managers, 7 "coders" engaging in social justice and one workhorse coder is entirely realistic.
I doubt though that Musk can figure out the actual workhorse in a short time. The posers are very good at self promotion.
Weeding out those who change pronouns in documentation and agitate on Slack would be a reliable start. From there, close reading of PRs, their usefulness and code quality is required. LOC is not an indicator.
2. As another commenter mentioned, I don't even think this would be possible given California WARN Act requirements, but I'm less sure on the legal requirements here.
Of course not, I would expect him to say nothing in that case.
Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous how people conflate "Elon is a bad guy who stretches the truth all the time" with him sending out a completely unambiguous statement that, if it were a lie, would easily be proven wrong in one day. Point being, people who do stretch the truth/over-promise know how to do it in a way that isn't falsifiable in 24 hours.
Again, the outright lies he tweeted were not something that were provably false in less than 24 hours.
Just consider his infamous "Funding secured" tweet. I considered that a lie, but there is obviously enough wiggle room/deniability over what "secured" actually means. That's not the case here.
In any case, the deadline has already passed. If there were to have been mass layoffs before the Nov 1 deadline, it's too late.
I mean, he did send out that classic "funding secured" unambiguous statement right? Which was insane and people doubted immediately. He had to settle with the SEC barely a month afterwards.
Valuations would be down 70% (eg $META, $SNAP) if it weren’t for this buyout so I think the majority of employees end up better than they would have been. Annual grants are usually 10-25%.
Usually salespeoples' pay is highly incentivized: I doubt the base salary of those salespeople is $300k. Those $300k people are probably bringing in millions of dollars of revenue apiece. Firing them will reduce operating expenses some, but drastically reduce income as well, unless they're replaced with something else.
Sales managers will just hand the accounts to new executives. It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore. They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them, not to do favors for their favorite executive.
> It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore.
They absolutely will. Media buyers for the gigantic companies expect to be wined and dined very aggressively. Early in my career I worked for an agency that had a couple truly massive EU companies as clients. You know these names. I saw first hand that the personal charisma and relationship of the agency owner was the only reason those execs kept coming back. And he went to very great lengths to stroke their egos.
With buyers that big, there's always another agency. So as soon as the buyer doesn't like something, buh bye.
I have a friend who works in sales at a tech company and since all of this accounts are long term customers he really doesn't do much. They like the service so it is basically an auto-renewal. So I guess Elon thinks that advertisers will just auto renew because they like the ROI they get from their spend on twitter.
However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings.
> However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings.
Advertising spend doesn't work like pharmaceutical sales. They will renew precisely because they like the ROI, whether they get pampered or not, because as advertising channels, social media platform are additive. If it gives you positive ROI, you're strictly better off advertising on a network than not advertising on it, because the social networks themselves are mutually exclusive in terms of attention. That is, you can't access Twitter's eyeball-seconds any other way than through Twitter.
Not sure why this gets downvoted. IANAL but it every compliance training I've ever done, basing company business decisions on being invited to fancy dinners raises all sorts of red flag when it comes to compliance with anti corruption laws.
You don't base your decisions on fancy dinners, but you do get invited to fancy dinners! It's all part of the game and those who know how to play it play it well.
Yep. The GP is saying that advertisement spending is decided by corruption. On in other words, all the middlemen in those agencies that will "optimize" your spending are corrupt.
I see no reason to doubt it. But I would need some evidence before believing, and this thread has none (in any direction).
I found the first part confusing to parse. It reads to me that 7000 is the 25% getting layoffs and made me think they had 28000 employees. They actually have ~7000 before layoffs.
Terminating huge amounts of the workforce when they have next to no knowledge of the inner workings of the company... well, it's going to be a disaster, and I think all the tech people here know it. I'm sure there are some areas to cut, but they almost certainly don't know which yet. Cutting 25%, you're going to mess up. Then you have to face the reality that the other 75% will be seeking the exit - few want their workload to increase by 33%, plus work for someone as mercurial and abusive as Musk and his team, plus be a party to the dying company which will inevitably become a more effective tool of the alt-right and extremists.
quick question here. I'm completely in the dark about US labour law and such but is it possible to lay people off if the sole purpose is to prevent them from receiving stock compensation? Sounds kind of wild given that it seems expected compensation when you signed a contract to work there in the first place.
> Sounds kind of wild given that it seems expected compensation when you signed a contract to work there in the first place.
Contract says you get the stock if you work for a certain period of time at the company. Consequently, if you're fired or quit before that period elapses, you don't get it.
There are laws that restrict firing someone to avoid a payout, at least in some states.
Not sure if it applies to stock vesting. From what I understand, the main goal is to prevent an employer from firing someone at e.g. 19 years 11 months tenure purely to avoid paying them a pension.
I don't know about the law, but it makes a lot of sense of to me. Compensation that's "in your pocket" is compensation you have. RSUs were _always_ a way to keep you around for a payout later (and potentially rescind the payout if they don't want you around). Viewing them as money in your pocket is a mistake.
I'm holding off my judgements on the Twitterverse until he has a chance to make real change. I don't particularly care for his attention span being focused on Twitter, I would much rather he focus on SpaceX and Tesla considering how successful his watch has been here.
This is unrelated but Tesla has no SUV, new sedans, hatchbacks, or anything that's even a concept. I thought it would grow into a larger car company with a more diverse offering.
Yeah, I actually agree. I wish they had a larger SUV(the model y is considered a small SUV) and it not being the model X. The X is essentially their large SUV/Wagon but it is a price range where there aren't enough other benefits for me to actually make the purchase. The Model S is still the most appealing car they make for my liking and the Cybertruck will eventually be once it's in mass production.
The middle ground I have decided on with my husband(since he wants a bigger car) is Model Y this year and the Cybertruck for me since I have had my reservation since the beginning and I will just wait for it(probably at least another 1-1.5 year even on an early reservation).
It's a damn shame if they lay them off a day before stock grants and they get none. I would absolutely sue if it was me. These are people who have been working hard and it would be a damn damn shame if their efforts were met with a screwing over. If I had a boss like this, I absolutely would not stay even if I didn't get laid off.
Twitters staff count has felt bloated at ~7,500 employees and I can’t help but think of “rest and vest” clips from HBO’s Silicon Valley, especially during Covid WFH.
not too far from reality though, with dramatic flair & exaggeration for comedy thrown in. BTW I did not realize it was directed by the same guy who did Idiocracy (Mike Judge). when it came out I thought 'not in a millennia' and now it seems .. passable ;-).
Interesting that David Sacks and Jason Calacanis are "Staff software engineers" - assuming that's accurate. To my knowledge, neither have worked as professional software engineers. Calacanis is a journalist turned entrepreneur/investor and Sacks is a former management consultant who became a C-suite during the dotcom boom who later became an entrepreneur/investor.
It’s a shame that Twitter is no longer public because I can’t imagine something more profitable than shorting a company than Jason Calacanis is an executive of.
I am 99% sure I agree with you. However I’m a bit out of the loop on Calacanis overall to know why specifically you’re saying this. I’m up for you giving me some keywords to look up on him too and doing my own research then.
Obviously that was a just formality to give them a title while they are in the building advising, it came from the company index system not their formal job description... another nothing burger.
It's probably just to get them into the system asap. I've seen this at companies in the past -- someone gets input into the HR system with a role/title that has nothing to do with what they actually end up doing. One time the HR person screwed up and a lower-level data-entry guy was mistakenly listed above the CEO. I have a screenshot somewhere; some decent comedy for a few days until the CEO noticed.
> Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were "staff software engineer."
Do either of these guys even know how to program? Calacanis has been making tech content for decades, and I've never once heard him talk about writing code.
Because it's kind of odd for someone who makes such a big deal about high performing engineering orgs to hire his non-technical buddies into top tier engineering roles?
Why not hire them into "Chief of Staff" or "Chief of Fuck You Parag" roles?
Do you seriously think that these two advisors he brought in for a weekend are now their top engineers?
They both have plenty of experience running tech companies and are advising on structuring the team…
I know everyone’s trying to jump on the hate bandwagon but this is a stretch.
I don't work at Twitter, so I don't really care what they call themselves. That being said, at every company I've ever worked at the people who have responsibilities like "running tech companies and [...] advising on strutting the team" usually have manager, director, or VP titles. It is a little odd to give a staff software engineer title to someone who isn't able to write code.
Like I said though, I have no horse in this race, so whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, no, because if I thought that was the case then it wouldn't be silly that they have a top engineering title. I'm saying that it is silly. I agree this is a bottom-of-the-list issue, but it does strike me as weird even for Elon.
- Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing.
- Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription
- Reports that he may lay people off (unverified)
- Carried in a sink.
None of these things are particularly unreasonable - Twitter owes something like 1 billion in debt payments this year and brings in close to $500 million, so layoffs were probably coming regardless.
I don't really see what the big deal with Musk buying Twitter is, except as cover for being mad about him unbanning people.
Yes, by historical Twitter standards it may seem unreasonable to write a Stripe API integration with simple UI and account history in six days. In the real world, however, a single developer can do it in less time than that.
Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.
It's possible that Musk is trying to set the reasonable expectation that a total comp package worth $400k should be exchanged for actual productivity, rather than playtime and busywork.
Ah yes, go ahead and create a stripe account that will allow $6m flow in less than a week, hit me up when you're done, that alone would probably require more than 6 days of back and forth with Stripe
I too thought I could rewrite twitter and instagram in 10 days with a few JS and PHP framework when I was fresh out of uni
> Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.
Tell me you've never been hired at Twitter without telling me you've never been hired at Twitter, lol. Every company has some dead weight, sure, but what you describe isn't remotely applicable to most people.
> In the real world, however, a single developer can do it in less time than that.
Which single developer can rollout payments globally in 6 days? How much time do they set aside to ensuring regulatory compliance with dozens of jurisdictions that have occasionally conflicting rules?
What? How would you feel if someone announced they were buying your company after breaking M&A laws and messing around with a significant portion of your net worth, tried to back out, further messing around with your net worth, started talking shit about your company, takes it over because they are forced to, then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.
I'm not sure if my perspective is warped or yours is, but from my standpoint this is all pretty common in corporate America. Companies are acquired or merge and most everything changes - polices, training, perks, and almost always significant layoffs. Similar things usually happen to divisions and groups within a company as leadership changes. Has this really not been a thing at places like Twitter?
The difference is that usually it's not covered minute-by-minute on all the major news outlets.
No one would want to be in this situation yet it happens every day. Where I'm at, new VPs take over our division every couple years and every time they reorganize everything, rename everything, promote some people, lay off a bunch of people, bring in their "people", change polices and procedures, etc. It sucks but it's part of business as far as I can tell. If I walked out every time this happened I think I'd be hard pressed to keep a steady job.
> How would you feel if someone announced they were buying your company after breaking M&A laws and messing around with a significant portion of your net worth, tried to back out, further messing around with your net worth, started talking shit about your company, takes it over because they are forced to
As a salaried SE, why would you care? Or is that about SV's love for paying in stock instead of cash?
> then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.
That's an unconfirmed rumor at best, a lie most likely.
> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription
> None of these things are particularly unreasonable
I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?
Most of these people don't have to work for Twitter. They ended up working there because it used to be a nice company to work for.
New ownership seems to have changed that, not only in the things that were rumored they would do, but also in the abysmal communication during the whole thing.
This kind of thing happens all the time and it's always a risk, but that doesn't mean that people
have to like it.
1. It's not like this should come as a surprise to anyone at Twitter. If you work at Twitter and haven't been updating your resume and reaching out to other contacts, don't know what to say.
2. Remains to be seen what severance package laid off employees get, but with the California WARN requirements I think it's likely to be at least a couple months, which is fair. Looks like Musk tried to screw over some of the top execs by firing "for cause" (and note, in an exec's contract "for cause" can't just be "we don't like the job you did", it pretty much always has specific stipulations about breaking laws or company policy, e.g. sexual harassment), but they have more than enough resources to sue if necessary.
3. Is there anyone who reasonably thinks that Twitter has a lot of unproductive employees that should be let go? I think unions can do a lot of good, but not if it's the standard "once you're in the union it's nearly impossible to let you go" situation. Highly productive employees hate working with people who just "phone it in".
I don't know how much anyone can trust anything coming out of Elon's twitter feed, tbh. He tried to squirm out of this deal with some pretty spurious claims. Now he's using the same spurious claim tactic to continue to try and squirm out of his failure to manage his bad acquisition.
>However he tweeted that there are 10 people managing for every one dev
What would the figure usually be.
You have marketing managers, people managing account maintenance, people managing bot reports, etc etc.
It seems to me, that's almost like complaining that an office or shop has 10 times more managers than maintenance guys. Both are locations where business are carried out rather than the actual business itself.
I feel like we're going to see a never-ending stream of speculation and actuality over the next year. We already have with the whole deal going down too.
It's exhausting how much attention this gets and how everyone has an opinion about it.
Journalism continues to fall in the "bullshit" camp that Frankfurt warned us about:
The Washington Post really has lost a lot of credibility since the Bezos purchase in 2013. It reflects a trend of consolidation of corporate media in the hands of America's ruling oligarchs (who exert far more influence over federal policies and expenditures than any Congressperson, and perhaps the President as well).
For example, I can't imagine the WaPo taking this same tone with regard to a Bezos acquisition or contract, or publishing confidential leaked details of inside business discussion, as it would almost certainly upset their owner and lead to 'a change in leadership' at the Post. The same is true of their coverage of the unionization effort at Amazon warehouses and distribution centers. Similarly, the CIA and NSA deals that AWS has engaged in aren't getting this level of scrutiny from the Post either, and there's little chance of the Post ever printing anything [like the 2010] "Top Secret America" series on how defense contracts are doled out to intelligence contractors.
I see them reporting on stories that others have generated, but what I certainly don't see is anything like investigative journalism targeting any of Bezo's business interests, i.e. generating original stories, publishing embarrassing leaks (that others have not already published) etc. Again, see the Top Secret America investigative journalism effort from 2010. There's nothing similar that the Post has done since Bezos bought it, is there?
Maybe for the simple fact that they are still predominantly a local newspaper for Washington DC. Their beat coverage is still largely going to be Federal US politics.
That's why we have multiple newspapers. The other ones can cover for deficiencies of a single one. The Post is doing great investigative journalism still, including this piece.
I understand the argument, but I find this a bit disturbing, as there are some topics that all of the oligarch-owned newspapers will not be willing to cover in depth. There is kind of a 'fringe' that will publish some details, i.e.
"(2020) Amazon: We Totally Don’t Want To Spy On You. Also Amazon: We Just Hired The Architect Of The NSA’s Mass Domestic Surveillance Program"
However, most people view that outlet as a highly partisan right-wing opinion-centric source (with rather limited sources), not at all the 'traditional unbiased news media' - which instead avoid the story, and instead just churn out a stream of pro-government, pro-corporate propaganda 24/7. This is pretty unhealthy IMO, since, ahem, 'democracy dies in darkness', and is the kind of behavior you see from Chinese and Russian state media, not from independent journalism.
Sounds like you need to start a newspaper and give unbiased news to the people and become super successful doing so! In the end there will always be a market for actual journalism and a market for sensational clickbait and a market for something in between. In my opinion outfits like the NYT, WP, Economist, WSJ etc are all super flawed but in combination are doing a pretty good job keeping government accountable.
I think it would behoove you, given how easily they bent over for Bezos and have silenced opposition against him, to reflect back on the last two decades and compare various outlets (including the ones you don’t like because they don’t align with your political stance) and see just for how long they’ve been corrupted.
They didn’t wake up in 2013 and suddenly decide they won’t have any integrity.
It's not that they don't align with my political stance, it's that they don't do their job of providing broad-spectrum information on the actions of governments and corporations. To emphasize, Top Secret America was an outstanding expose of the military-intelligence contracting system, but that was before Bezos got his ~600 million CIA web services contract, and soon after that he spent what, ~$250 million to buy the Post, after which that kind of investigative journalism was eliminated.
However, your point is pretty valid - back in 2002, the WaPo regurgitated US government talking points on (non-existent) Iraq WMDs without bothering to do any investigative pushback.
They literally have a section of the website dedicated to investigative journalism, including a number of recent investigations into government contractors, military officials, government corruption (all of these in October 2022!). Going back more over the past 6 months, you have investigations into police brutality, election integrity units, more coverage of government contractors and corruption, police corruption, and lawmaker self-dealing.
