Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the article, or at least the quote that the parent offered? This isn't about Twitter changing work site expectations/status. It's about blocking physical access for employees who were expected to show up at the office, without prior notice or any change in contract terms -- i.e. without their work site actually having formally changed.

This isn't even dystopian, it's just a management clusterfuck. Whoever thought this is the right way to handle this kind of a situation should be the first to go in these layoffs. Wow.

View on HN

> without prior notice or any change in contract terms

Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all? Did you put a contractual clause in about the right to office access when you signed?

> This isn't even dystopian

Well yeah my comment agrees.

> Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all?

Of course it is. The point I am making is that it's extremely bad management to handle layoffs and firing like that. You have the team leads schedule an appointment with the people who have to be let go. They tell them they are being let go, effective from X, with such and such terms (including access rights if they're in any way more specific than "you can't come to the office after X"). You have them thank them for their work and offer them a recommendation if they need it. This isn't some advanced HR management guru advice, it's common sense that should be standard adult behaviour.

Telling people who you have not yet fired that they can't come to the office anymore, possibly minutes before they come in to work, but also insisting that they go home so they can get the email that they've been fired is just about the worst way to handle it.

There's a potentially infinite set of actions that are within a company's contractual rights to do. Not all of them are okay.

What do you mean “whoever decided should be the first to go”? Musk decided. He’s pissed he overpaid and he thinks the whole company is a clusterfuck. This isn’t a “management failure”, it’s by design. Elon is cleaning house. Speed, not collateral damage, is his priority.

I mean whoever decided that the proper way to handle a layoff is to tell someone who has not yet been fired that they can no longer access company premises while they're on their way to work, or possibly wondering why their badge doesn't work, and should instead go home and wait to be fired from there. This breaks just about every management rule about how to handle a layoff, not to mention common sense.

What makes you think the person “responsible” did not make that point and Elon overruled them?

Firing the employees to be able to pay interest. Like he did with the marketing team at Tesla when it was nearly bankrupt.

Well, they did a “lockout go away” back in the 90’s when my company died. Fear of ‘rm -rf’ or some other act of digital vandalism or theft. Doesn’t say much about the business I guess,

Had a similar experience back in the early 00’s. Kinda back-fired though - one of the developers had happened to notice that a .com domain name they’d been desperate to buy for some time (because it was the name of their licensed IP) had become available a few days beforehand.

He’d bought it immediately planning to hand it over to the business… wasn’t quite so keen once they laid him off!

What are the chances that someone motivated to do something like that has put in dead man's switch code somewhere?

I would say less as that requires a bit more skill and risks being found upon code review. Acting in the heat of the moment seems far more expected. Although perhaps this situation points out up that “planning against all eventualities” is a good skill to have?

> It's about blocking physical access for employees who were expected to show up at the office, without prior notice or any change in contract terms

For 1 day, maybe a week or so by the sounds of it. It's not like they're suddenly closing all the offices permanently

So Twitter employees can work at home "forever", but they should work 80 hours a week while under explicit threat of layoffs, and return to the office for 12 hours a day, meanwhile the office is closed, go home if you are in the office now!

This is really what has happened inside of just the last 8 weeks. I can't blame anyone who just can't keep up, especially while that 12 hour a day death march was going on. This is really not how you should treat people, even for a day.

I mean, if you don't like it then quit. I think that's the point. Elon is going to run Twitter like his other companies which means he only wants people who actually want to be there and want to put in the hours to make the business work. Anyone not willing to do so should leave. It's a private company so he can set whatever expectations he wants, if the former employees don't like it they can start their own business.

I can't quit working at Twitter because I already don't, but I am downloading an archive of all my tweets as we speak and I'll be having my finger on the trigger to delete my whole account, which I'm totally sure coming from me, a nobody you never heard of, is, like, an equally serious threat – I mean seriously though, have some solidarity with the workers. Do you want to work under those conditions?

If it paid well then yes I would work under those conditions. I don't have to stay at a job for life, I can put in extra work to earn extra money and then quit when the schedule or environment no longer suits me. I'd much rather have that option than be stuck in some crappy unionized shop where everything moves at a glacial pace, get underpaid, and have it be nearly impossible to find another job because all other workplaces are the same and no one is hiring, firing or growing.

If you want to work there, fine, I hope it pays well! But I'm telling you, I saw a tweet when this all began about how someone once set about $2B on fire to buy Yahoo! and what fun they were looking forward to having (as a Twitter user) helping Elon set the new record for cash bonfire volume and speed-run, and from my perspective we are now watching that play out in real-time. I don't want to work there, I don't even want to be mentioned in the same sentence as there. You can find me on Mastodon from now on.

Especially if they’re making something excellent or world changing.

Some people blame victims aa a defense mechanism. It's so they can justify in their head that it can never happen to them because they are smart, and hardworking and deserving and whatever else. It usually takes such tragedy happening to them personally for them to gain empathy. Even then, some of them don't. They only end up having empathy for their own tragedies, other people's tragedy is deserved

I've been laid off before and I've lost jobs for a variety of reasons including the company going under. What I've learnt from it is that you just have to keep moving forwards. If you try to cling to the past or hold on to a mental framework or lifestyle that isn't working it'll just drag you down. I get that people want security but in the end the only real security is that which you provide for yourself, if you put blind faith into systems that you don't have any control over at some point they will fail you, most of the time through no fault of their own and you'll be left to fend for yourself. That's why I always start from that position, I make sure I'm able to protect myself first. Everything else is window dressing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com