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Comment by martius | Hacker News Reader

Even if we assume the changes are for good and will "fix" the company, asking people to work nights and week-ends while conducting mass layoffs in less than a week is a "treat employees nicely" issue.

Actually, I think we're more on the level of "threat employees with basic decency".

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We don't actually know the situation. If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem. I looked at it charitably. Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it. This points to terrible product management, which points to terrible engineering leadership, which points to a terrible C-suite. It sucks, but once you pass the point of no return you can't hire more people (they take months to ramp up), and you're gutting the low performers (they will slow you down), so unfortunately the work has to be foisted onto the rest. It's not a fun time, it will cause more people to quit, but it's also the only solution to fix a trainwreck if you notice the speeding freight train too late.

Being this hostile though will end up chasing out the high performers too, since if they’re good they can relocate easily.

To be clear, that's not the only choice, it's the path of least resistance and framed as the only choice.

The other choices are just more work.

> If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem.

No. The fact that it even crosses his mind as an acceptable demand at any time is a problem. No one, under any circumstance, should ever be asked to work that much in a week. It should be a criminal offense for an executive to even allow employees to work that much.

> Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it.

Nope. Even if it would otherwise go bankrupt that choice shouldn't legally be available.

Dang dunno why I got downvoted. Guess people are upset at reality.

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