Twitter laid most of their staff off then Musk gave them an ultimatum of: commit every day, all day, sleep at the office, to Twitter, or get fired. I wonder why there was more work produced in that period.
Musk stressed the hell out of twitter. His technique and demeanor were total trash. They probably fired the wrong people in many situations. But he did prove that they were overhired by 50% or more.
Twitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to.
It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.
If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
I feel like Musk is making a spectacle of Twitter layoffs as a way to curry favor with those who very vocally disliked Twitter’s moderation policies, most of whom were just social media clout chaser types. Makers getting sacrificed to please the attention-seeking “professionals”
This. Even before Musk arrived there was a lot of debate about Twitter being overstaffed and departments are not producing any value at all. I don't know more or the details, but this is what sometimes I was reading years back.
Unrelated, but genuine question from someone who doesn't really use twitter. What happened to Twitter's QoS falling apart after Musk laid off all those people? Were the warnings overblown and unrealistic, or is there just an inside story? I feel like I heard a lot about how they were doomed and now it seems like they're rolling out new features.
To my understanding most people there are moreso hanging on because either they have nothing else lined up or because their H1B visa is going to be automatically revoked if they quit Twitter, which would force them out of the country with no grace period.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
If it is possible for Twitter to layoff employees, retain previous customers, and add more... I dunno, what was the previous management doing? I mean it is of course possible that Musk is just much more competent than them.
Is there any reason for anyone to stay at twitter? I’ve not seen Musk offer any upside anywhere to remaining. He’s laying out a stark plan of hard work and fewer benefits and a brutal management. What reason other than inability to find another job (perhaps due to visa status, the hiring freezes at end of year, and layoffs) does anyone have for working at twitter now? I’m shocked if they don’t see another 50+% voluntary attrition in 2023.
The vast majority of twitter staff should have been laid off years ago, and would have been getting laid off now as the US continues to experience credit tightening. Musk just did it faster.
Musk sounds like a nightmare to work for. Why would any self-respecting developer stick around under these conditions? I expect an exodus of talent from Twitter in short order.
Musk hired people who wanted to change the world. His businesses at the time were the only place to push the envelope on space exploration to Mars and launching a commercial EV.
Twitter on the other hand will never get such motivated workforce
Fired a bunch of people, probably lost a lot of institutional knowledge about the systems inside twitter. Lost engineerring moral, so new features, or bug fixes are less likely to come out (or whatever that comes out will be shit quality).
On the other hand, Musk saved twitter a bunch of money. However that doesn't really benefit users.
Fortunately, or unfortuantely, depending on your POV, twitter's network effect is so large that even such a move by Musk is not going to break twitter - at least, not in the short term. There's just too much momentum, too many users that currently rely on twitter as their source of information.
This was an interesting article until it started praising musk for slashing half of twitter - I don’t think the HR and legal departments were doing fake work, and the current lack of stability seems to indicate that a good portion of those people layed off where actually important.
It's interesting in this day and age to see a platform degrade at the speed twitter did in quality, stability, user experience, etc. I suppose what's the most surprising is that it seems it was intentional. I wonder how much Musk has been sandboxed at Tesla and SpaceX? Perhaps he was encouraged to do the twitter deal to get him away from the other two companies. Like a shiny object to occupy him and his time.
Elon fired a principal engineer last week because the engineer had the temerity to tell him that fewer people wanted to read tweets by the increasingly unhinged Musk.
Morale must be thru the floor, and work/life balance insane.
I sincerely wonder why anyone would stay at a place like that. Are the remaining employees True Believers in Elon and his plan? Are they that afraid of the current job market?
Or was there really tons of dead weight at Twitter? With such deep cuts, I'd have expected even more serious outages than what we've seen so far.
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