Laid-off Twitter employees sound off about company’s “red wedding” | Hacker News Reader

Laid-off Twitter employees sound off about company’s “red wedding”

deadline.com

27 pointsCharlesW32 comments

Sounds a bit like reasonable downsizing. Ethical research team in a microblog/chat company?

Obviously there was bloat, but its the handling of layoffs that tell a lot about their new ceo...

There is no way to carry out layoffs that people will see as being good. So what exactly does they lay-offs say about their new CEO? Except that he has a fever frenzied army of journalists chasing his every action and trying to draw it ups as ether the single most important thing in our generation or the start of our entire species downfall?

There was an acquisition and now there’s a trimming of fat. Is neither unexpected, unusual or in anyway outside the typical action you would expect of any competent ceo.

> trimming of fat

That's a misleading understatement. He fired half the company. He decimated the staff six and a half times.

It's shock doctrine at the scale of a single company. This, along with the elimination of the old guard leadership, will destroy any lingering anti-Musk factions. It will save some money on salaries too.

It's not a great experience for Twitter staff, but it's a rational approach from Musk. It paves the way for him to radically alter Twitter's culture and agenda, if he chooses to do so (and may already have done so).

In any case, all this nonsense and political stuff would make it very difficult for talented people to accept offers with Twitter. Even if they did, they would need to be compensated for all the extra risk. This is no way to run a tech company.

You have an algorithm that deciced what kind of content millions of people see every day. Only optimizing for engagement is a bad idea as Facebook showed

To be honest ethical principles sounds like an even worst optimization target then engagement due to Goodhart's law.

When it becomes the measure it ceases to become effective, and will likely be gamed to some extent.

you sense zero ethical issues at a company who's biggest question in the most recent last ongoing question is the definition of censorship? literally zero possible ethical consideration? I'm sure there's bloat too but yeesh

How can Musk expect the people he doesn't fire to still stay on? They are gonna lose even more employees.

Maybe he doesn’t? They can probably limp along on a skeleton crew while they decide what Twitter 2.0 is all about.

Also, not the best time to quit your job unless you have something else lined up because it seems everyone is cutting back these days.

There's plenty of open jobs. The US tech companies are cutting back because their startup suppression either worked and they are going to become an average cyclical industry or it failed and they are on the way out.

maybe they like him

They don’t.

Honestly I don't really care about Twitter employees. The company is not going exceptionally technically amazing. The entire sector is going through layoffs. No idea how they were able to stay alive so long while turning loss after loss.

I too don't have much sympathy for them. Everyone knows that employment is at will for both employees and employer in most of the US. They all get a nice severance that gives them plenty of time to find new jobs which shouldn't be that hard for them.

Twitter is bloated and has been bleeding cash for too long.

> In its sixteen-year history, Twitter has only rarely been profitable. Over the past decade, its core features have barely changed, and its growth has been much slower than that of many competitors.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/twitter-is...

The Twitter employee gravy train is over. Time to pull your weight and be productive whether you stay at Twitter or move on.

For some reason I can’t help picturing you yelling this at your step-son and then popping a beer at the end. (Except the url, I guess… you’re not yelling that part in my weird little fantasy)

Yeah, that is a weird little fantasy.

Just for the record, I'm happily married, love my child very much and don't even drink. I was laid off when my wife was pregnant and did just fine. No hard feelings for that company at all. They had to do what they had to do and I'm at a job I like better and pays more. I hope the same for anyone laid off, at Twitter or elsewhere.

The fantasy wasn't that weird. They drew a compelling scene that complemented the shocking lack of empathy in your comment.

Oh, sorry you're shocked and sorry I don't have sympathy for tech workers that have the education, skills and connections to find cushy jobs that pay at the top percentile of wage earners in the U.S.

I'll save my sympathy for the homeless, hungry and bottom percentile earners that work hard at an honest living and scrape by everyday trying to feed their families. Sorry that my sympathy is too limited for you.

"Empathy" has been overused in this industry to the point of meaninglessness and virtue signaling.

I think on HN, I see same exact logic applied to Twitter employees with $300k compensation as to an Amazon warehouse worker getting paid $16/hour; i.e., labor rights above anything else.

The crowd here is blind to this circumstantial disparity. Another blind spot is if you replace $300k engineers getting laid off with $100k managers getting laid of at say IBM, the tide reverses, no more empathy for managers! How dare we!

Save your sympathy? Sympathy isn't a coin purse from which you judiciously spend and save. It's just a perspective on how you choose to view the world. You get to choose -- are you going to view the world from the perspective of people first, or from some other more grotesque perspective like their value as employees or contribution to the GDP.

It's the easiest thing in the world to both think "my heart goes out to these people who have been suddenly disconnected form their income" and also to have a focus on those more in need.

It's just figure of speech. The meaning in this case is I choose to have sympathy for those that are really down and out not rich tech workers.

The main reason I choose not to have sympathy for them is because they are rich (comparatively) tech workers.

The main drivers of sympathy (at least for me) are how well you know or identify with someone and how dire their situation is.

I don't know anyone personally in Ukraine, but they have all my sympathy because their situation is truly horrible.

Likewise, I don't know any of the laid off Twitter workers. But their situation is anything but dire or even bad. They might think it is, but objectively, it is not. It might turn out to be the best thing to happen in their life actually. So no sympathy there.

Look, your scope of sympathy is different that mine. Yours includes rich laid off tech workers and mine doesn't. I think that's ok. You're comfortable with your boundaries and I'm comfortable with mine. I don't think I'm a bad person for it. If you think so, you're 100% entitled to your opinion. Let's leave it at that.

It is crazy. The stock has been going sideways since the IPO [1], for a tech company during one of the most fertile and robust economic decades, Twitter's performance has been absolutely abysmal.

Twitter hasn't innovated, the whole thing has been running on autopilot since the IPO.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/ynnmx6zu

Compare with a company like Cloudflare that launches new products at a breathtaking pace, Twitter just seems so docile and unimpressive. Yes, I've spent thousands of dollars on their ad platform and it is a complete shitshow on the backstage too. Twitter's ad platform is a joke compared to Meta.

I feel bad for any employee that gets laid off, but to not see the problems in Twitter is being way too emotional and not very objective. Twitter needs a reboot. Those that stayed have a great future ahead.

The employees don't deserve basic human empathy because the company wasn't technically amazing and made no profit? In what twisted world view does that make any sense?

People literally celebrated the (illegal) destruction of my last job by Uber/Lyft because everyone has had at some point in their life a bad cab ride.

That one dude I pulled a knife on and then got arrested for being belligerent to the cops…top level customer service right there.

Nobody said that. These are not workers in poverty, they are making a significant amount of money and know the risks. There will be severance packages and they'll be hired elsewhere. This has happened to dozens of well known tech companies in the last few months. We're only focusing on musk because politics.

Literally the comment I responded to said that:

> Honestly I don't really care about Twitter employees. The company is not going exceptionally technically amazing...No idea how they were able to stay alive so long while turning loss after loss.

Anyways, this has nothing to do with Musk. I just think anybody losing their only source of income deserves basic empathy first, and I will happily call out comments that spin it as if they somehow deserved it bc they worked at twitter or weren't renowned for their engineering prowess.

90 days severance during the holidays.

Staying and having to work long hours under Musk.

Maybe we have empathy for the wrong group…?

No not at all, but the severance package they're getting (pay until february) is not worthy of condemnation. By all means... they're getting a sweet deal. First, a high equity payout (since Musk overpaid by all accounts) and now a great severance. It's sad, but I find it distasteful they're seeking to be objects of sympathy.

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