> working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines)

but how many people actually do this? Even then, if someone does it and learns from it then they've set themselves up to make even more down the road

That seems to me to assume the people are robots. Or Vulcans, or whatever.

It just seems weird to me. And again: you are taking the financial perspective about making money. That‘s just plain weird to me.

I’m talking about psychological impacts, not money. Having empathy for the psychological impact of the situation these employees find themselves in. Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing. To suddenly have that taken away is certainly not easy. I mean, if you liked your colleagues that‘s people you were around a lot and suddenly won’t be …

And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.

There have been a lot of layoffs during the last few weeks and months and while, yes, HN commenters typically did recognize the economic circumstances that led to that they also had a lot of empathy for those who were laid off and were able to differentiate and recognize if employers were treating those laid off well (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy) or not so well.

Why is that impossible with Twitter? And I think hardly anyone would give Twitter and Musk good marks here.

> Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing.

You're assuming here that people work long hours because they identify with their employer. If a programmer works long hours, is it because they love their employer or because they love programming in general? I'd say the latter, it sounds to me like you're saying the former

As far as the colleagues part goes, if someone is truly close to their colleagues, they keep in touch even after leaving the job. If working at X employer is required to keep in touch with those colleagues, the relationship isn't that strong to begin with

> (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy)

I mean, if you're laying someone off, how it's communicated is of secondary importance. There's a way of doing it professionally and giving them proper severance, doing the right thing, et cetera. But what exactly do you have in mind here, with "laying someone off with empathy"? Are you talking about Musk being a dickhead? Personally that's less insulting than seeing a CEO fake crying about laying people off on LinkedIn

> And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.

You might be generalizing a bit (with respect to attitudes seen here). Musk is an unprofessional asshole. Would you prefer he pretend not to be one and lay people off with "heartfelt conversations" instead? Personally I find the former less sickening than the latter, but ideally he would've just done a normal layoff sin theatrics and moved on

As for the employees, I'm sure it's awful and they're scrambling rn to find new employment. Luckily for them they have Twitter on their resume. I do however worry about the people on H1b finding new employment in this economic climate