Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. Instead, Musk has already laid people off to the point that they are trying to hire back people previously laid off and current employees are sleeping in the office. Now he is pushing even more people out the door with no control over what teams will be hurt the hardest.
> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed.
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying
Twitter just to destroy it for the lols.
Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis,
trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of
fuck-you money and an axe to grind.
At first this was my thinking as well, but then towards the end of the article, the author mentions an "all hands meeting" he had with employees before completing the acquisition, and apparently he said in that occasion that he was against remote work.
Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company.
Changes in terms of employment, like going from WFH to mandatory in-office, makes employees eligible to collect unemployment should they choose to quit. It's one of the few reasons you can collect unemployment after voluntarily quitting.
Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.
This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..."
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
You are giving Musk too much credit. He’s a classic control freak and micromanager, and right now he’s trying to run twitter like 6 person start-up that running low on funds.
Truth is he probably wanted to eliminate even more staff than he did. It seems like he wants to get the smallest possible team that can keep the core product of twitter running, platform for posting small content blocks.
He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.
But it s not a neutral decision. It is likely you are left with the employees who are willing to tolerate a worse lifestyle for the paycheck, and you are letting go employees who are smart enough to prefer to have more control of their lives.
A long standing maneuver that companies have is the "your job is now in Houston" when you live in New York. This has an interesting side effect of basically removing anyone from your company who is old enough to have a family with kids in school, wife working etc. Basically it "legally" removes the older more expensive employees. RTO will remove people also like you said, but I wonder what demographic?
If you view every employee as interchangeable this makes sense. Clearly that isn't the case.
What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.
From a Machiavellian (? I think) perspective, better to do the layoffs first and flood the job market with people before making other unpopular decisions that may drive people away. No idea if that was the plan but it makes sense.
(Even if the number cut doesn't amount to anything market moving, they probably share a lot of the same network, and it will definitely looks like a flood of job seekers in most twitter employees bubbles, and those of their immediate networks)
Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be the less productive fraction of the employees.
To my understanding, he's only laid off teams that he doesn't think are important so far. I know everyone is talking about 50% layoffs, but from what I can see that hasn't actually happened yet, it's only confirmed in the sense that it will happen.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see anything saying that, only teams that have been reduced by ~15% and other teams which have hardly been reduced at all
I know I’m stating the very obvious but this and the layoffs feel quite adversarial.
The vibe I get from Musk is that he doesn’t care about much more than the numbers and believes that a hard dictatorship is warranted in this situation.
The sudden one sided decisions backed by ultimatums give me the impression of lack of respect for his employees and downright abuse.
I don’t see how such a relationship can nurture a positive company culture or retain top talent.
Given that the best people might find new jobs faster than the worst, you might drive away the better half of your human resources. With the 'fire-first' approach, you have more control over who should leave (e.g. hiring managers).
I don't like it either, but I think that is part of the rational behind it.
> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs?
no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers
The layoffs and departures on their own are by my count possibly getting close to saving the company a billion $USD a year. That's the projected cost of the debt obligations he took on buying the company. EZPZ.
Great plan. Now you got rid of all the people with options and you've kept all the deadweight. Many companies do exactly this with voluntary redundancies!
Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: ["emphasized" above]
Elon: Insane potential for improvement
Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>
Jason: Day zero
Jason: Sharpen your blades boys
Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary
departures
No, you're obviously wrong. Firing people first lets one get rid of the underperformes, while announcing the unpopular decisions first gets rid of the overperformers.
I think you have it backwards. This is how you accomplish a 75% reduction while only having to lay off (and pay severance for) 50%! Musk again playing 4d chess.
I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective.
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other billionaires on the other side of the country.
And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason.
What an absolute knob.
Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.
"On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The Times.
The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer. Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.
Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.
"Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned."
This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of "free".
Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be commercialised.
Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more fantasy than reality.
The timing of this is the content - not the ending of remote work issue. It's using the news cycle and a hot button issue (end remote work) to bury the regulatory liability of the headline of the 3 chief complaince officers resignation the day before a FTC complaince filing.
Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was:
1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).
2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.
With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.
With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.
Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
Why would anyone work for this douche? Even if you make a lot of money, you aren't going to get your time back later. There's no reward for killing yourself to appease a rich workaholic. The only prize you win is burning out or getting laid off.
> over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.
Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants to voice their thought, nothing of value was lost.
I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.
In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
Regardless of the merits of remote/office or what this announcement would mean at a normal company, it sounds like it must be pure chaos at Twitter right now.
There is a lot I love about the Elon Twitter saga. Scoping it to this issue (remote work):
1. We all know that "butts in seats" is a form of psychological control. Yes, there can be benefits to physical proximity. For software engineers, there can be benefit for collaboration, team-building and teaching. You can do this remotely but it's more difficult. However, for a lot of jobs however there is absolutely zero benefit to the employee.
2. This should remind people that your relationship with your employer is fundamentally adversarial. Remote work, despite it saving tech companies in particular, a lot of money for office space, onsite perks, equipment and so on, sold it to you as a "benefit". It started out of necessity in the pandemic. More recently it became a compeititve necessary to draw and retain talent in a tight labor market. In an era of mass layoffs in tech that advantage is no longer needed so companies can revert to their natural state of seeking control and not offering benefits they don't have to;
3. Elon is a very old school American (ironic, considering he's South African) boss who very much rules out of fear and for whom loyalty only flows in one direction: up (to him). He is not Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. He's just another annoying, cringey, incredibly privileged fail-son. I'm honestly glad more people are realizing this as this is not the man to deify;
4. Morale among the remaining Twitter staff must be (I would guess) incredibly bad right now. Rather than extending these people an olive branch, the Bataan death march of reshaping Twitter into Musk's soulless image continues without respite, casulaties be damned; and
5. For many this will be there first downturn market as you could easily have been in the workforce for the last 12 years without ever experiencing it. You may have bought into the idea, particularly if you're an engineer or other highly specialized position, bought into the idea that tech companies are different and/or that you aren't expendable or replaceable. None of this is true. Unfortunately, people (Americans in particular) use such rationalizations to argue against any form of labor organization as being unnecessary or that somehow they'll all be dragged down to the "average" by collective bargaining. Such ideas are just highly effective propaganda.
This whole thing is SGI syndrome. The tight knit teams that were either let go or quit Twitter will go and found the next equivalent Nvidia or Adobe. Elon is making the classic Valley blunder of trying to make a company something it's not, in this case x.com. See also AOL, Yahoo!, and Tumber.
If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat my shoe however.
Born with an emerald spoon in his mouth, it's no surprise that Musk has no empathy with the common worker.
On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.
[+] [-] evbogue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgyo|3 years ago|reply
The problem with this method is that many people DID relocate to keep their jobs. And then were layed off two months later.
Imagine uplifting your life for your job, and then being told you need to find a new job anyway.
[+] [-] danans|3 years ago|reply
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.
[+] [-] mastazi|3 years ago|reply
Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company.
[1] i.e. almost guaranteed
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.
[+] [-] Zigurd|3 years ago|reply
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
[+] [-] blindseer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strangescript|3 years ago|reply
He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.
[+] [-] Ptchd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
(Even if the number cut doesn't amount to anything market moving, they probably share a lot of the same network, and it will definitely looks like a flood of job seekers in most twitter employees bubbles, and those of their immediate networks)
[+] [-] kazinator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guywithahat|3 years ago|reply
I'm happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see anything saying that, only teams that have been reduced by ~15% and other teams which have hardly been reduced at all
[+] [-] andrei_says_|3 years ago|reply
The vibe I get from Musk is that he doesn’t care about much more than the numbers and believes that a hard dictatorship is warranted in this situation.
The sudden one sided decisions backed by ultimatums give me the impression of lack of respect for his employees and downright abuse.
I don’t see how such a relationship can nurture a positive company culture or retain top talent.
[+] [-] arendtio|3 years ago|reply
I don't like it either, but I think that is part of the rational behind it.
[+] [-] whacim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piva00|3 years ago|reply
> Day zero
> Sharpen your blades boys
> 2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary departures
[1] https://muskmessages.com/d/34.html
[+] [-] mdcds|3 years ago|reply
no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers
[+] [-] Apofis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shermozle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bursted|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cokeandpepsi|3 years ago|reply
Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: ["emphasized" above]
Elon: Insane potential for improvement
Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>
Jason: Day zero
Jason: Sharpen your blades boys
Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures
Jason: https://twitter.com/jason/status/1515094823337832448?s=1O&t=...
Jason: I mean, the product road map is beyond obviously
Jason: Premium feature abound ... and twitter blue has exactly zero [unknown emoji]
Jason: What committee came up with the list of dog shit features in Blue?!? It's worth paying to turn it off
Elon: Yeah, what an insane piece of shit!
Jason: Maybe we don't talk twitter on twitter OM @
Elon: Was just thinking that haha
[+] [-] Mouthfeel|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jesuscript|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] batter|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] borissk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boatsie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
[+] [-] alistairSH|3 years ago|reply
And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason.
What an absolute knob.
Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|3 years ago|reply
"On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The Times.
The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer. Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.
Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.
"Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/elon-musk-twit...
This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of "free".
Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be commercialised.
Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more fantasy than reality.
[+] [-] ldbooth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).
2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.
With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.
With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.
[+] [-] VLM|3 years ago|reply
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
[+] [-] jimmypoop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamredwoods|3 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi...
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|3 years ago|reply
Why would anyone work for this douche? Even if you make a lot of money, you aren't going to get your time back later. There's no reward for killing yourself to appease a rich workaholic. The only prize you win is burning out or getting laid off.
[+] [-] kleiba|3 years ago|reply
...for some definition of the word "permanent".
[+] [-] rgovostes|3 years ago|reply
Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants to voice their thought, nothing of value was lost.
[+] [-] autospeaker22|3 years ago|reply
Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.
In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
[+] [-] jedberg|3 years ago|reply
Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever (buzzfeednews.com)
2953 points by minimaxir on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 1353 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647
[+] [-] throw__away7391|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
1. We all know that "butts in seats" is a form of psychological control. Yes, there can be benefits to physical proximity. For software engineers, there can be benefit for collaboration, team-building and teaching. You can do this remotely but it's more difficult. However, for a lot of jobs however there is absolutely zero benefit to the employee.
2. This should remind people that your relationship with your employer is fundamentally adversarial. Remote work, despite it saving tech companies in particular, a lot of money for office space, onsite perks, equipment and so on, sold it to you as a "benefit". It started out of necessity in the pandemic. More recently it became a compeititve necessary to draw and retain talent in a tight labor market. In an era of mass layoffs in tech that advantage is no longer needed so companies can revert to their natural state of seeking control and not offering benefits they don't have to;
3. Elon is a very old school American (ironic, considering he's South African) boss who very much rules out of fear and for whom loyalty only flows in one direction: up (to him). He is not Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. He's just another annoying, cringey, incredibly privileged fail-son. I'm honestly glad more people are realizing this as this is not the man to deify;
4. Morale among the remaining Twitter staff must be (I would guess) incredibly bad right now. Rather than extending these people an olive branch, the Bataan death march of reshaping Twitter into Musk's soulless image continues without respite, casulaties be damned; and
5. For many this will be there first downturn market as you could easily have been in the workforce for the last 12 years without ever experiencing it. You may have bought into the idea, particularly if you're an engineer or other highly specialized position, bought into the idea that tech companies are different and/or that you aren't expendable or replaceable. None of this is true. Unfortunately, people (Americans in particular) use such rationalizations to argue against any form of labor organization as being unnecessary or that somehow they'll all be dragged down to the "average" by collective bargaining. Such ideas are just highly effective propaganda.
Sorry Tweeps for all you're going through.
[+] [-] linuxhansl|3 years ago|reply
Step 2: Claim company is not profitable (partially due to the interest payments you yourself loaded onto it)
Step 3: Lay off 1/2 the staff.
Step 4: Try to get some of these people back, because you need some projects done (that actually happened)
Step 5: Enforce unpopular and useless work rules.
Step 6: Profit... Maybe?
I want to believe that he knows what he is doing, but it certainly does not look that way!
[+] [-] pdx6|3 years ago|reply
If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat my shoe however.
[+] [-] vooner|3 years ago|reply
On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.