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Comment by saxelsen | Hacker News Reader

The text messages that were published as part of the suit to close the acquisition showed Musk discussing "return to office" as a way to naturally trim some of the workforce by having the dissatisfied remote workers quit on their own.

My take on the paper printing is that it is a similar strategy to get people to quit by themselves, because they think it's stupid.

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The two aren't similar at all.

Commute to work = hours lost every day with drastic lifestyle change. Some people even move further away from the office during pandemic.

Printing code on paper = 1 minute of work. Paper and ink are paid by company. It is not really that much of a problem.

Actually, this is a punishment on the reviewer. No jump to definition and etc.

The printing story is fake. I call it now.

Imagine if you printed off your code and ended up with only a few pages of paper you’d fee pretty silly and may quit from embarrassment

Just a thought nothing to back up this claim

Do you need to print code for that? You can just look at your PR history instead.

Also, if you print code, it will contain other people's code because it is likely not only you who code on those files...

This story is really too stupid for everyone involved.

It is not even good nor efficient for the reviewers. It is like the reviewers are also punished.

Too stupid to be true.

Why would I quit from embarrassment? This doesn’t make sense.

Have you written more than a few pages of code in the past 30 days?

I’m not paid by lines of code.

Good lord no, that’s the worst metric to measure someone by. The diffs one produces on a mature codebase are usually tiny but with a small novel in the ticket about what the change will affect.

I could pump those numbers up easily but my coworkers would hate me for it.

>Imagine if you printed off your code and ended up with only a few pages of paper you’d fee pretty silly

I would copy/paste some hundreds pages from GitHub so Musk would give me a raise. :)

Can someone from Twitter do this and let us know how it goes

Yup, Jason Calacanis "back of napkin"ing a 30% reduction in workforce based on nothing more than some texts with Musk and an hour or two of bloviating.

Do you think the trimming will apply to all levels of performance? Will it push out the poor performers, the high performers, or just take out a random cross section?

Is there a correlation between employees who like to avoid the office and employees you don’t really want on the team any more?

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