Theory of what’s going to happen next at Twitter
twitter.com
twitter.com
Suppose the story was something like “Jeff Bezos acquires company, immediately slashes workforce, maneuvers to avoid paying severance, reportedly forces engineers to work nights and weekends under threat of dismissal (and probably will lay them off anyway).”
The tech community would be pretty united in saying the engineers would have to take care of themselves first in this situation.
But when it comes to Musk, the community is more amenable to looking at it from a business perspective. I have seen a sentiment of “tough shit, if you don’t like it then quit, he has no obligation to you.” There are many who call the engineers entitled or otherwise resent them for pursuing a strategy of “weather the storm until assured of some kind of severance and then immediately quit.”
Hackers are a community that rail against upper management for being out of touch and implementing stupid processes, but when it comes to Musk allegedly telling engineers to print their code on paper, some say “well that’s not too much effort, plus you’re being paid to do what management asks, so don’t whine about it.”
Hackers may have even more contempt for the slackers and sanctimonious activists currently at Twitter.
This is just like the far-left and the far-right aligning with Russia, because they loathe their immediate opposition so much.
I have been accused of looking at this entirely through the lens of hating Musk, but I imagine that many are looking at this entirely through the lens of hating Twitter.
Pretty short-sighted imo. My opinion about new leadership forcing engineers to work nights and weekends is entirely unaffected by the company’s former PR strategy for handling culture war issues.
The "internet of beefs" is very real. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ (not a Rao supporter, but this essay is so spot on at describing the phenomenon)
I mean as long as nobody tries to hack or exploit Twitter, in which case things are gonna go very badly. Particularly since the people he's firing probably have root on a lot of boxes.
Then all of those people should have absolutely no problem finding another job.
As for Musk and Twitter, it's been such a cesspool and a biased bubble of groupthink that I think many outsiders (i.e. your average user) is willing to give Musk a chance at doing what he thinks needs to be done.
Telling people to "ship a feature in a week or you're fired" is abusive as hell. And this isn't some clever three-dimensional gambit to get people to quit: Musk has done this elsewhere as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...
I mean, he didn’t do this. It was reported he was planning to, and then he said he wasn’t going to, and then so far it hasn’t happened.
Honestly, he seems to have a very effective propaganda (i.e. "public relations") effort behind him. With unusual frequency, I'll see someone regurgitate some propagandistic talking point without any hint of irony (e.g. answering criticism of him with "Musk is literally saving humanity, what have you done?").
I don't know how much of that is from effort (e.g. astroturf) or just hitting the right nerve and getting people to work for him for free (e.g. very online nerds who believe in sci-fi, so put their faith in Musk personally because he constantly claims he'll make some their sci-fi dreams come true).
I don't have any particular love for Musk nor would I want to work for any of his companies but it's incredibly frustrating to me to see people pretend like taking EVs mainstream and re-usable rockets aren't an incredible feats that he's played a large part in accomplishing (even if it's just by funding, for the people who say "he didn't do any of that work!"). And he's objectively a good businessman, given that the metric for business is money.
Some communities are incapable of espousing anything positive about people that they've deemed the enemy.
You cannot remove a sitting President when you’re functionally the town square. We now know COVID almost certainly was a lab leak. You don’t get to enforce your views on the world forever - this is gravity pulling down the bubble.
He's doing everything he can to make layoffs happen without actually laying people off, which sure seems like he's trying to evade California's 60 day warning for layoffs.
I suspect we'll see him in court over how this was handled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal#United_...
1. a reasonable person in the complainant's position would have found the working conditions intolerable
2. conduct that constituted discrimination against the complainant created the intolerable working conditions
3. the complainant's involuntary resignation resulted from the intolerable working conditions
The test isn't necessarily something we would be able to make a definitive decision on here. It is intended to be used in the courtroom where each component would be necessary to establish constructive dismissal and evidence for and contrary to each point would be presented to a judge/jury.
As you can rightly assume "reasonable", "intolerable", and "discrimination" are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I'd expect and decision to rest on what constitutes "reasonable", "intolerable", and "discrimination".
1. https://federalemployeelawblog.com/2017/07/10/constructive-d...
Question from Europe: Is that actually legal in the US? :-O
Is this true? I buy that there are plenty of people willing to work on Tesla or SpaceX or even things like hyperloop. But do people have the same passion for Twitter?
What's kind of annoying is that as a Tesla owner, many people assume I'm an Elon fanboy. Nah, I don't really like him. I applaud his ability to take risks, but I wish he'd shut the hell up sometimes.
After his takeover I wouldn't even consider it, so I think you're right to question this.
Of course he'll find someone, but whether it'll be the right people is another matter.
Wouldn't be surprised if Twitter loses some 9s & other quality and a competitor eats their lunch with a clone. Reminds me of the death of Digg.
Cults?
At least for Telsa and SpaceX, his propaganda (PR) efforts have established some grand "for the good of humanity" narratives," for the companies, and passionate true-believers are easily exploited.