Ex-Twitter Employees live-tweet their termination, good-byes | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Twitter Employees live-tweet their termination, good-byes

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46 pointsjpalawaga26 comments

I wonder how many sub-systems, background jobs, infrastructure scripts, etc. needing extra hand-holding by engineers to keep things running smoothly. Even if its a once a year update certs in a file type of task. I think every company has stuff like this no matter the size, startups probably more so.

The reported 50% reduction will have zero transition obviously so knowledge of these system oddities existence will likely disappear.

It will be interesting to see how their site's availability looks over the coming weeks. There might be little weird things that stop working or worse.

I understand that layoffs suck. But it's not different at any other company.

Just because it is Twitter, tech, and Elon, we can make a big deal out of it and public outcry, insult the CEO etc.

But when it's any other large company being taken over, needing to pivot, and laying off 30-50% of staff... people are much more understanding.

What I'm really surprised about is the firings of pregnant women. In other countries, this is more strictly regulated.

Can you show one example of a 500 company in the last 10 years that layed off 50% of their headcount on a single day?

I don't know about 50% but Citi group, Boeing, Ford and GM all did lay-offs in the 20-30% range in the last 20...

https://fortune.com/2015/09/20/biggest-corporate-layoffs/

HP did 30% in 2008 over multiple rounds.

Does anyone actually know how many Musk is laying off? (It seems there is an enormous amount of BS being claimed here, I heard 80%+ but with no reliable numbers, who knows)

there is a leaked list with 3578 people that's roughly 50%.

Link to the leaked list?

I didn’t understand how they justify seemingly ignoring CA laws on mass layoffs. Oh, right the laws don’t apply to tech billionaires.

> What I'm really surprised about is the firings of pregnant women. In other countries, this is more strictly regulated.

I don't think it is forbidden to fire pregnant women, even in countries where it is strictly regulated. However, it is usually forbidden to fire women because they are pregnant. Here Twitter laid off half of their staff, and if they can show that they were "fair" (for example by firing only half of the pregnant women) they may get a pass.

But anyways, in countries where pregnant women are well protected, employees in general are also well protected and Musk wouldn't be able to do what he does now.

There is a really fine line between well protected and economy damaging. When you look at twitters structure this was a long time coming and really needed to happen to turn twitter into a competitive company. It would be a shame if this could not be done because it would leave Twitter being an utter dog on the way to eventually failing and would tie up many thousands of talented people doing useless, wasteful stuff. It will be oainful but atleast now twitter has a chanve to grow ibto somethibg better and thousands of people will be freed up fir far more productive tasks, including pursuing their own great ideas via a startup.

Looking at these tweets, employees look like they had good relations with each others.

I wonder if Musk will not get more than he wanted. That is: ex-employees finding jobs elsewhere, and calling the rest of their team that is still working for Twitter, i.e. poaching.

If Musk messes up with Twitter enough to make both employees and users want to leave, I totally expect another company to take advantage of this opportunity to create a competitor. My bet is on Facebook: they are good at social networking (better than Google at least), they have what it takes to kickstart the network, and the are in need for growth (the metaverse is ambitious, but not exactly a success right now).

Geez I feel bad for these pregnant women.

I don't know the status of public healthcare in the US but really hope there's a system not attached to their employment

If you’re laid off you can get COBRA coverage which will keep you on your employers plan for up to six months. You have to cover the entire premium out of pocket though, and for a family of four that’s typically 2-3k/mo.

COBRA is OK in theory, but as you mentioned it is prohibitively expensive. During the gap between my last employer and current I opted to just take my chances for the month because the cost for even a single person was outrageous.

I think that you can retroactively apply it if you do end up needing the insurance, but you'll be on the hook for the cost of the entire time period until you elected it. I could be wrong though, every person I talked to told me different things and it's extremely confusing to navigate. It's a pretty terrible system all in all, IMO.

You have 60 days from termination to opt in and it applies retroactively, which is nice for changing jobs. You can have a couple months gap between the old insurance ending and your new stuff picking up and if something happens just opt in.

Rougher if you don't already have that next job lined up though.

In CA it’s 2 years, but few could afford it while employed let alone out of work

It's called COBRA and it's basically a system that allows you to keep paying for your insurance for a limited time after you lose your employment.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra

So, it's not really public healthcare at all, but as close to a literal safety net as you'll see here. The individual still needs to find a way to pay for it with no income.

Aside from COBRA, a life changing event (such as losing your job) allows you to get insurance through healthcare.gov outside of the open enrollment period.

If you are pregnant and low income, insurance and healthcare is free. I guess jobless would be low income. Every state has similar program, for example WA

https://www.hca.wa.gov/free-or-low-cost-health-care/i-need-m...

And there's already at least one jerk following the tag so they can copy/paste the same hateful comments at everyone who's laid off. There are people who make Twitter bad, but it's not the employees.

That's Elons alt account.

Can we consolidate Twitter threads into one? I am seeing at least one or two new threads here every hour all discussing same thing.

Half of the bots are already fired they are looking for a new place :^)

All the fired twitter employees should get together and form a new twitter

I scrolled the feed and found this gem: https://twitter.com/strangertemple/status/158843243360696320...

When you work on the "ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability Team" at Twitter and you wonder why you were laid off. Twitter is a bloated mess. This was going to happen in any case.

Are transparency and accountability in their moderation decisions important? I'd say so.

ML/AI also have a host of ethics concerns that I think it's incredibly important to grapple with lest we all slide into a Black Mirror level rabbit hole someday.

Now, it's possible they had unqualified or do-nothing people in those roles; I don't know. But having teams with those goals in general seems quite important for a large social media platform like Twitter.

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