Twitter sources say company reached out to fired people asking them to come back
twitter.com
twitter.com
My coworker relayed his oracle layoff story to me, which is where I got this bit of info. Would love if someone else had a verifiable source.
I guess the trick is instead of saying "no," say nothing so you can play dumb. "Must have been marked as spam."
That whole page is interesting to read.
Elon: I would like to understand the technical details of the Twitter codebase. This will help me calibrate the dumbness of my suggestions.
Parag: I wrote heavy duty software for 20 years
Parag: I used to be CTO and have been in our codebase for a long time.
Parag: So I can answer many many of your questions.
Elon: I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program managero/ MBA types of people.
...
Elon: Crypto spam on Twitter really needs to get crushed. It's a major blight on the user experience and they scam so many innocent people.
Bret: It sounds like we are confirming 7pm at a private residence near San Jose. Our assistants reached out to Jehn on logistics. Let me know if either of you have any concerns or want to move things around. Looking forward to our conversation.
Parag: Works for me. Excited to see you both in person!
Elon: Jehn had a baby and I decided to try having no assistant for a few months
...or you can say "I'd like to come back for double the pay."
Just playing dumb might not be enough of a reason if you actually open it.
If they're locked out of the company's email system and they'd been told 'this is your last working day,' and they didn't check their personal email/answer the phone ("whoops! must've gone to the spam folder!"), I don't think Twitter has a leg to stand on when it comes to forcing them to come back on the threat of lost severance. Their last contact with the company told them they didn't work there. It's pretty black and white.
Just all around sloppy lawyering on that separation notice, imho.
> Today is your last working day at the company, however, you will remain employed by Twitter and will receive compensation and benefits through your separation date of February 2, 2023.
> During this time, you will be on a Non-Working Notice period and your access to Twitter systems will be deactivated.
> While you are not expected to work during the None-Working Notice period, you are still required to comply with all company policies, including the Employee Playbook and Code of Conduct.
It seems like a refusal to go off of the “None-Working Notice” would be treated the same as any other refusal to follow assignments and it would make legal sense that it would turn to a termination rather then layoff.
Not moral, but legal IMHO
Apparently, Twitter instantly lost ~15% of their 2023 revenue because of their poor showing at NewFronts where a lot of upfront ad buying is done. And with Musk firing the very teams the advertisers care about e.g. ethics, brand safety, human rights the industry is turning against them. Decade of painstaking work by Twitter to attract these advertisers gone in a week. And even worse Musk fired many of the relationship managers and so the company can't smooth things over.
It really isn't inconceivable with this trajectory that Musk could bankrupt the company within a year.
Does this mean that “woke” people are people that work hard and have money to spend, while the non “woke” dont? What does this say about the “non woke” crowd?
What is even woke?
Am i “woke” because i don't want to buy products advertised on a platform where people are insulted on a daily basis due race, gender or sexual orientation and i want people to freely express their personality without risk of verbal or written injury?
Is it maybe that brands understood that being associated with the types that loiter our social networks and scream abuse at passers does not sit well with sane people like us?
How these are weighted I dunno. But yeah, sounds pretty much like chattering class ;)
So I think we can safely assume that since things have gotten nothing but worse for Twitter since that they didn't book those commitments. In fact we have seen a large exodus of those exact type of advertisers in recent days.
It really does look like Parag may have slipped Musk a poison pill.
Of course taking a company private means you can't use the market to pay your employees...
"Today is your last working day at the company, however, you will remain employed by Twitter and will receive compensation and benefits through your separation date of February 2, 2023."[0]
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/read-blunt-email-telling-twi...
Seems pretty clear to me
If I offered every unemployed American a job in a cesspool, that wouldn’t magically invalidate their eligibility.
Laws around this aren’t written for professional/management employees. The rules are designed to protect tradespeople who get laid off every winter, etc.
Most of these employees don’t have contracts, so if you refuse to return or don’t like the terms, you’re resigning. And what’s happening inside of the company is that the political networks will be smashed and rebuilt. People will be sucking up to the new overlords to be made junior overlords. There’s no rules around rehire and the market is soft, so you’ll probably see the new power players bring back people loyal to them.
This is why I always eyeroll at “10x” HN posters who think they can negotiate with big companies. When the chips are down, you’re a peon, and however smart you are, there’s another guy.
Reminds of the Korean show 'Good Manager' where the company is trying to get the employee to quit rather than be fired, and keep making the work environment worse and worse in a comedic fashion, and he keeps finding ways to somehow get work down.
Or only he can produce this feature, e.g plenty of folks tried to improve python or perl performance to an acceptable state but no one succeeded.
Happens all the time. People are less important than they think. Even without this whole layoff business, people in big corps get themselves competing offers and go like 'give me a raise more than this, or I leave'. In every scenario that I saw people leave nobody missed them after 1 - 2 weeks.
As a general rule everybody can be replaced, and everybody can always find a new job somewhere and most do. This is with or without layoffs and happens in ordinary situations too. People leave all the time, many think they are 10x, and they get replaced. Nobody misses them.
My mom always said this to me. Very good advice over my long career. Don't get too uppity, because even if you are a star, most businesses will hire 3 people to replace you rather than deal with an uppity star.
For instance, my understanding of SpaceX is that he really should be seen as the initial financier of it to chase a crazy idea. Gwynne Shotwell is really the one in charge of day-to-day operations. It's just that Musk shows up for the fun bits and gets all the sound bites in.
In addition, Tesla engineers were probing Twitter for "top talent", and also involved in reviewing the printed out on paper code.
If I were at Twitter, I would be deeply humiliated by this treatment. A bunch of Tesla "stars" rolling in hard to rate the "Twitter clowns". Fuck. That.
And print out? Printing code was acceptable and common in the 80s and even all the way into the late 90s. Who prints out code nowadays? Is there even a button to do that in most IDEs? Don't know, never cared to look.
What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is this? It's like they literally pulled managers from the 1987 GE to do this "merger".
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone would expect them to be. AIUI the pay isn't great, and upper management is... well, see his behaviour on Twitter, so I'd kind of expect anyone who was any good to just leave.
Thinking about tomorrow: this establishes a hilarious incentive. A nonzero fraction of people who know that this was the criteria will change their behavior to suit. More lines of code, you say? Coming right up! I've met some people who work / worked in shops where the number of commits per day was the ruling metric. The smart ones wrote scripts to carve their commits into plausible but small chunks.
I agree that it’s possible, but this rumor has somehow become a little too close to “accepted truth.”
tbh it's more monumentally stupid to try and rehire employees one day after laying them off.
Including the very thread IMO, firing and then saying WHOOPS.
https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588907407002185729
Gergely is respected and not in the business of repeating rumors.
Another option would have been to kick one's balls "Tai chi style," moving the foot ever so slowly toward the groin. But if you're not used to doing that you're just as likely to strain a muscle or trip.
But if that’s not you taking your job back just seems like a really bad idea in a circumstance like this. How could you ever have faith in the company leadership again?
Wow.
But to just randomly throw away 3700 people and they beg (let’s say) 500 with “wait we didn’t mean it, come back” is on a different level.
Always better to look for a job while employed
> How could you ever have faith in the company leadership?
Faith in Twitter leadership is off the table at this point - employed or unemployed
Working more 80 hour weeks?
That's the thing, if you don't trust leadership anymore and they are asking you to come back after firing and going to pay you, that's the ultimate fuck-you: keep working as little as possible while searching for another job. You are getting paid to look for another job by the same leadership that tried to fire you.
Then, it's at-will employment. You can always be terminated with or without cause.
Yes you can be fired any day, but people usually aren’t. They can go many years without it.
This took a week.
How do you know it doesn’t happen again in a month when things are going worse?
And, more importantly, what’s the mental/physical toll of the stress something like this causes after happening once and then hanging over your head for the rest of your tenure?
Are you surprised that a company that is losing money has a reduction in force?
It is still legal to hire child labor for agriculture. Approximately a quarter of food in the united states is picked using child labor.
No, I didn't. It seems pretty clear that you think his public behavior was AOK. Many people, including me and the person you originally responded to, think Musk has little regard about the effect his behavior has on his new employees.
Most people consider getting laid off to be a significant disruption to their lives: their finances, their reputation, and often their mental health. Doing that to 3700 people (or whatever) and then a day later saying, "So do you want to work here or not?" doesn't cancel out what happened a day or two before. Do you understand the old phrase, "you can't unring the bell"?
You could argue layoffs are abuse. But you’d have to convince me Twitter’s specific implementation of layoffs are more abusive than any other company’s. From what I read, 3 months severance was offered, which they have no legal obligation to offer. That doesn’t seem abusive to me.
I don't know how to say this any more clearly. Laying people off and then days later asking them to rejoin is just jerking people around. You might not agree, but that is exactly the abuse this subthread has been about. Not memes, not secret stuff that I claim to be privy to.
> You could argue layoffs are abuse.
This is exactly what I and the person you originally responded to were pointing at as abusive. But not just the layoffs; it was the layoffs then asking for a do-over just a day or two later. For someone worth $200,000,000,000 dollars, firing and rehiring hundreds or thousands of people might be seen as indecisive or fickle behavior, but to those employees it could be quite a lot of turmoil.
That's exactly the argument.
> But you’d have to convince me Twitter’s specific implementation of layoffs are more abusive than any other company’s.
Why? Does it need to be worse than any other company layoff to be considered abuse? Why is that your bar of "abusive"? It needs to be worse than any other company, so if other companies push this slowly it becomes progressively more ok to you?
Or should we consider other similar layoffs (buying a company, stripping it of workers to lower cost, increase gain for the capitalist) as abuse as well? I'm on the latter camp as it seems most on this thread are.
> From what I read, 3 months severance was offered, which they have no legal obligation to offer. That doesn’t seem abusive to me.
Does it become abusive for you when it's at scale? If you do that to 10-20 employees I might see it as less abusive. When you do that to 3k+ it is, morally, more abusive.
I'm not too bullish on his new revenue plans either. I don't think there are that many people willing to pay $8/mo for verification and to avoid ads. Most people on Twitter are consumers of content and have no need for verification.
I agree it’s bad, but there hasn’t been a lot of worker solidarity in tech so I don’t think anyone should be surprised that it can happen to us too
On the point of solidarity, i stopped using amazon when i learned about the abuse their warehouse workers are subjected to. Went from hundreds of £ a month in average to literally 0.
As an industry we’re kinda assholes on average and have an overinflated opinion of our individual abilities and an underestimated importance placed on the situation that made us valuable
Even outside of the US I still see a disproportionate amount of workers in tech being anti-union, anti-labour regulations, compared to most other industries. Probably due to the gold rush that tech has become the past 30-40 years, so many fortunes and wealth was created that still gives hope to many workers that they can make it at some point.
At the same time, we get so many privileges as tech workers that workers from other industries look at us more as part of the rich capitalists class than what we actually are: salaried workers. The class divide also happens from the other side, I had numerous conversations with blue-collar workers (friends, acquaintances) where I had to clearly spell out that I'm on the same team, that I defend the same values about work protection and dignity as they do. Divide-and-conquer between blue-collars and white-collars is very visible and I feel we need to shorten this gap to actually empower workers.
not a total loss, if the net effect of this is that it catalyses more critical thinking and in the long term we get a better deal
Before that I was considering a Tesla as my next car. And I was actually excited for SpaceX developments. Not anymore. It's a shame to see a clown digging the grave of really nice tech that thousands of people have worked for ages to create (Twitter, Tesla, basically everything Musk touches).
What's complicated is he's a bit like Travis Kalanick in that he needed an absurd amount of self-confidence to go build Tesla (or Uber). This is the same self-confidence that lead to some questionable decisions later.
you are right that he did many other things before that that I've maybe written off as eccentricities (although I admit looking back that the signals for who he is where there all along)
It was a contract position, so you can’t be “let go.”
That said, you definitely shouldn't accept a worse deal.
git log --author="$EMPLOYEE" -p | wc -l"git summary" from git-extras works too
pip install git-fame
cd twitter
git-fameThis effectively happened at many companies unintentionally in 2020 between the initial lockdown onset mass layoffs and the later boom for tech companies.
Elon Musk makes brash decisions and has no idea what he's doing here.
> four people with knowledge of the matter said
This is such a bizarre spectacle. I'm not sure why there is a such a media frenzy? It's one tech company.
Second, it’s Musk. He’s famous, a celebrity (of sorts), and VERY VERY rich. Not only does he have haters, people seem to love watching the successful fail. “I knew it. He’s not so great. I could have done better.”
And finally, it’s just 100% nuts. This is not how the business world works. He over bid on a company as a joke (?) after getting high (?) with the price being a weed joke. Then he tried to back out and got sued. Then at almost literally the last moment he went through with it and has almost DESTROYED the company in a week.
It’s a perfect storm of WTF-hate-drama about a world famous company and a publicity hound.
I pretty much never assume this, from grocery bagger to CEO, but in this case I'm absolutely confident that I could've done better.
Because not buying the damn thing is obviously better.
It's one very large, very visible social network that had a very dramatic, drawn out, and absurd takeover executed by someone who is very eccentric.
But if I think of the impact of Twitter for most Americans and I’m not sure they’d notice if it disappeared one day.
However the real impact is if it becomes a service to push partisan agenda. Elon has already shown his biases multiple times and his duplicitous nature. He is very much on the cusp of being the new Murdoch.
Whether or not many Americans use Twitter is going to be irrelevant compared to the impact it will have on society.
It already has? Do you remember the banning of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the election. You know, that story that turned out to be 100% true?
Even today, it’s not “100% proven” that the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden.
So the goal was to curtail misinformation, which is clearly needed for folks like yourself.
I've been in tech for 20+ years now and never seen a situation like this.
In a single week, Musk has single-handedly put them on a course to bankruptcy. The firings have been sudden, indiscriminate, short-sighted and ineptly executed. Advertisers who Twitter desperately needs are fleeing the company in droves and may never come back. The level of debt is clearly unsustainable and its revenues are declining rapidly.
The only thing that comes close to this is the Digg V4 redesign.
He's owned it for like a week. This is hysteria.
[1] in the UK if you lay of more than 20 or 100 people at one time you need to notify the business secretary 30 or 45 days in advance https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/05/elon-musk...
https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...
This whole Twitter layoffs is so interesting. even DHH got something to say about it.
Furthermore, the Apple layoffs were directly connected with the cancellation of specific projects. It was well known at the time that Apple was seriously overextended with huge, over-budget projects. The Next acquisition made some of these redundant. Jobs and Next brought a clear strategy for Apple and the base materials on which to execute that strategy.
DHH cites analysts with qualms about Apple's future and tries to compare them with coverage of Twitter today. But there's simply no comparing. If you read the contemporary coverage, nobody has any real concerns about Jobs. The critical ZDnet piece he quotes even acknowledges that the layoffs were necessary for survival. The theme of the skeptical analysis of the time was not "is he going too far", but "will it be enough".
DHH is right about one thing, though: "Twitter ain't Apple, Musk ain't Jobs".
Apple was on the verge of being bankrupt and had a ton of projects that were never going to go anywhere e.g. eMate, Newton, OpenDoc, Cyberdog. And they weren't contributing to revenue at all.
At Twitter we've seen the entire ethics, human rights, accessibility groups etc go. Which directly contributes to revenue since advertisers want these in place to mitigate brand safety risk.
Twitter was pure ego, he's never going to profit from it, financially or popularity.
he's never going to profit from it - That is a pretty bold statement, care to share how you reached this conclusion?
He is being attacked now because he is making powerful people uncomfortable. He used to be rather popular before that.
Then there were the overt stock manipulation games he played. He could get away with them because he is stinking rich. Most other people who tried that would have been charged.
How many years has he been promising fully autonomous driving just as soon as they finish polishing the software?
Then there was the boring company. The flamethrowers. The flopped solar roofs project. The cyber truck. The 18 wheelers that were due years ago. The string of dalliances with young girls. The names he gave his children. His juvenile meme/twitter practices.
There were many of people who didn't like Musk long before he mentioned buying twitter.
Most entrepreneurs run experiments that are unsuccessful and end up pulling the plug.
Musk was praised when he was doing cool shit (neat cars and rockets). Now, he's wrecking something people like, and looking like a complete tit while while doing so. Somehow he's shocked that praise doesn't follow.
State tax revenue per capita are in Texas is about 35% of California's.
vs city and county taxes.
Best I could find was this:
https://taxfoundation.org/state-local-tax-collections-per-ca...
If he doesn't think there is value for money, it is appropriate that he moves. He doesn't have a moral responsibility to prop up California if he doesn't think they are spending his money effectively.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/30/elon-musks-california...
It's overrun with Californians
Elon is making this transactional. If you are truly needed bad enough that they will come calling right after a layoff then soak them for 3x. It’s just business.
Even granting the 50% target was the right amount, it was very hard for me to believe in a single week you could accurately select that 50% and transition key company knowledge to the people left.
Surprising for this particular comment to be my lowest rated comment on HN, hah.