Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers to Please Come Back | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers to Please Come Back

bloomberg.com

140 pointsceejayoz179 comments

If I were asked back I'd take it (hopefully with an increase in salary) then I'd actively search for another job. Once I landed it I'd give zero day notice. Fuck them.

I understand I could be potentially hurting coworkers by adding additional work to their plate but Twitter didn't give 2 shits about the people left behind and the work that they would have to take on.

Why is it corporations can "layoff" without notice but as an employee you are expected to give 2 weeks notice? I guess one could argue that if the corp gives a severance pay then that makes up for sudden layoff. But it doesn't. Even if I have a savings for emergencies employee sponsored health insurance will eventually end. Then COBRA kicks in and there goes your emergency savings if you have a family.

Of course the whole U.S. health insurance shit-show is for another discussion but when you have a family AND a serious health issues, health insurance is front and center on one's mind.

If I never had to worry about health insurance and have the ability to go get the care I need/want would take a huge burden off of my shoulders and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Sorry for the rant.

The at will is both ways, legally. It’s the massive unequal market power that forces two weeks notice.

They were given 90 days severance… which is like 6 standard notice periods.

Not the original plan to do that, so there was a forcing function. Check further down for the comments noting that severance is there to cover the WARN period.

The U.S. healthcare system traps people in companies, for fear of losing access to reliable healthcare. A system that was completely independent from employers would be much more beneficial to employees. Plus, it would save huge administrative costs for private companies. This would especially benefit small companies, but, really, it would make the job of running any company much easier.

In that universe people might possibly work for lower wages. It’s an income effect. Plus the present value of future healthcare costs goes far down too (individually and in aggregate).

Healthcare.gov. We've had that system for 12 years. I've never had employer healthcare, it was way more expensive than private insurance in Hawaii, which anyone can get and you auto-qualify for enrollment if you change jobs or move.

https://www.navapbc.com/insights/twelve-years-of-healthcare-...

Are you saying you’ve declined your employer sponsored healthcare and just signed up at healthcare.gov and it ended up being cheaper?

Yes. The plan my employer had in Hawaii was $700/mo for pretty average coverage. On Healthcare.gov the best possible plan I could get, $0 deductible, full coverage, etc, was $510/mo.

I think the difficulty is that most people who have employer healthcare have never checked healthcare.gov because they didn't need to, but it's hard to keep seeing people perpetuate this idea that hasn't been true for over a decade.

Ah, you might not have kids? I just went through the sign up process. All the plans were about the same for me on Healthcare.gov: $1,400 a month with no coverage until after a $14k deductible. This is for a family of four in Georgia.

I suspect you're also putting in your current income, rather than something much lower that you'd be experiencing if you just lost your job.

I do this, because I need one of the higher-end plans with the low cap on out-of-pocket expenses. It'd be more expensive to take my work's; cheaper on monthly premium, but my family OOP max would be $14k instead of $4k.

I have noticed several people in my life seeming to vastly overestimate the cost of getting healthcare through the healthcare.gov exchanges. If you leave your job, you can just do that. It’s much cheaper than the COBRA price, which I think people are looking at. For many people, it shouldn’t be a huge problem to get insurance this way. (I would still prefer single-payer!)

Depends if you quality for the subsidy or not. Mine's $2400/month (family of four) through the exchange. Going up 10% next year, too.

> healthcare.gov exchanges. It’s much cheaper

Interesting... I've heard it's the opposite, price-wise.

A lot of folks compare the amount they pay in premiums against it, which is a mistake, because that's almost always only part of the cost; employers tend to pay all or some.

I ran into someone who genuinely thought their health insurance ran $100/month, because that's how much got deducted in their paycheck.

I'm curious what prices you are seeing and considering no big deal; because I'm not sure if you're seeing different prices than I've seen, or just have a different threshold for what would be a huge problem for most people?

I've seen like $600/month for an individual, and this is just kind of ok probably good enough insurance (with a non-trivial deductible). For a family, even more, $1800 or more a month. Again for not great insurance. For me that'd already be a significant problem, but maybe not for an ex twitter engineer? Or maybe if you are a single person in your 20s (or I forget, do they still charge different for different ages post obamacare?), or in a different state than me, it's a lot cheaper?

Those are normal prices.

https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2022-section-1-cost-...

> The average annual premiums in 2022 are $7,911 for single coverage and $22,463 for family coverage.

People get shocked by COBRA pricing, but it’s literally just your existing plan’s cost plus a max of 2% for administration. The real cost of health insurance is hidden from almost all Americans.

Maybe an extra $22K/year isn't a "huge problem" for the average twitter engineer with a family (although if you have enough to afford it, you probably want better insurance than that not-top-of-the-line $22K/year one), but I am confident saying it would be for most people!

Those numbers to me confirm that health insurance is part of what makes it hard for Americans to quit jobs.

That is certainly a hot take. When a company is losing $4 million a day drastic measures are in order to save the company so the remaining employees still have a job. Having worked in tech for over 20 years and being on both sides of layoffs I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.

It definitely looks like Twitter was a hot mess and needed an amputation to save the patient.

Yeah, cry me a river for the poor heart-broken decision makers, who (in fact) aren't actually losing their job.

Would you prefer drawing straws like a marooned pirate?

AFAIK the company didn't lose $4M/day until the advertisers halted their ad buys because of the uncertainties brought by the new management.

And the interests on the debt the company got from Musk.

I have no doubt that for most of the people making the decision of which person to lay off it would be hard. They are human.

But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day? If so, then hard to have sympathy for them.

If the decisions were being made above the managers, in the C-suite, then it is their asses (which we all know Elon sacked them as well). If I had to make an educated guess I would assume their severance pay is orders of magnitude greater than the 90 day severance that the regular Joe and Jane got.

So let's say the decisions that cost the company $4M/day came from the top, not middle managers and not the end employee. The people who say "we have to lay off X amount of people, today, tomorrow, ASAP" are not the ones who are doing the actual telling individuals they are laid off. So in their mind this is "the price of doing business". Again, fuck 'em. Why should the individual who got laid off, rehired, found a new job then give the requisite 2 week notice? It's the price of doing business.

In my mind either we are going to take out the human aspect or we aren't and both sides need to take the same approach. It can't be "it's business" on one side and "the human element" on the other. It can be, but I'm not going to play that game. In a couple of years (if that long) I'm going to be forgotten about and the business will probably keep on keepin' on.

> But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day?

Twitter is losing US$4 million a day now, with the added interests Elon has to pay back on his US$ 1 bi loan to buy Twitter. So using this claim as a justification is exaggerated, by the sheer fact that most of that US$ 4 million figure is from Elon's own creation.

He is directly the reason they are losing $4 million a day. They weren't losing anywhere near that before he took control.

It sounds like it just recently got some potentially terminal disease, so maybe the cure is to cut the tumor out, instead of all the limbs? But it might be just too late.

Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?

Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.

Only in this case he cut off a whole hand.

> I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.

We want C-Suite execs to think of employees as people. But in reality the C-suite execs just think of them as another expense, albeit a necessary one.

At the C-Suite, everything is a number: number of employees, income, expenses, etc. The most important ones are cash on hand, and profit after expenses.

Here's a thought experiment: If Elon offered you $100 million to fire half the company would you do it? Personally I'd have a hard time saying no to that.

> Personally I'd have a hard time saying no to that.

Particularly when you tell yourself that they’ll find another job easily.

That's what I would tell others as a cold-hearted condolence whether I believed it or not. I'd just be looking at the cold hard cash.

Of those 4M/day, 2.7M are the interest on the leveraged buyout debt that Musk had Twitter take, they weren't there before!

In comparison, assuming an everage yearly cost per fired employee of 200K, by firing 3000 of them they are saving 1.6M a day.

Musk added 2.7M/day of purely financial cost, and then tried to reduce the damage by firing half the company and it's not even nearly enough!

And this is before the lost income from advertising...

I won't pretend to know business better than the richest man in the world, but from down here this sure looks like the train wreck of the century. We'll see I guess.

I wonder if all these commenters blaming Musk for screwing up Twitter and the layoff realize that the pre-Musk Twitter had already planned layoffs.

> Before Musk took over the site, Twitter had already planned broad layoffs, which would have affected up to a quarter of the staff, according to people familiar with the plans. The Post reported previously the company’s board was planning to cut thousands of jobs as part of an effort to save $700 million in labor costs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/03/elon-mu...

This is like saying that people who call new painting as super ugly on the wall should stop complaining, because there was originally plan for different painting. Size of layoffs matter. How you execute layoffs matter. How you choose people to be fired and how you treat them matter a lot. And also, it matter a lot whether you dont play into hostile attitude nonsense toward them on social media (they were surely all lazy useless zero product employess think should be at least commented on).

You can come in, have respectful speech, announce yourself as an owner, announce future layoffs and then work on one that at least appear semi reasonable. Or, you can come in with sink, hahaha, make it into twitter joke, spend weekend planning layoff while joking about it on twitter.

These two are radically different.

eh, most of the comments here aren't saying what you're saying. They are blasting Musk for having layoffs in general.

It really does not seem so to me. They complain about size of it, speed of it and the way it was done. They are however reacting in more of emotional way.

The thing is, Musk really went out of his way to troll Twitter employees and those who like twitter. And his fans really went out of way to mock fired people, call them lazy and so on. It was not just layoff, it was layoff designed to let you know how much looser you are.

People respond in kind, with schadenfreude and bullying back.

> They complain about size of it, speed of it and the way it was done

I haven't seen much of that here in HN though. Do you have examples?

> It was not just layoff, it was layoff designed to let you know how much looser you are.

Again, I don't see that. It just needed to be done. Could have been handled better? Were mistakes made? Probably. But I don't think it was intentional to show what a loser people are.

DHH has a nuanced take on it that I like. https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...

He quotes Jobs during his return and reboot of Apple

> Some mistakes will be made. That's good. Because at least some decisions will be made too. We'll fix them... But I think it's so much better than where things were not very long ago.

I would probably take the job and proceed to do fuck all until they fired me again.

A company tried to get me to come back and do handover after terminating a contract in breach a few years back. Agreement was a month. I did nothing for the entire month because they didn’t specify a deliverable. Due to working through an agency that was larger than the company I got paid and they got told to piss off when they complained.

> Sorry for the rant.

Don't be. These are things worth ranting about; and even moreso they are things worth acting upon.

There are elections in the US this week, right?

> Why is it corporations can "layoff" without notice but as an employee you are expected to give 2 weeks notice?

Both sides can equally give as much notice as they want. 2 weeks is only customary, but also seems to be rarely honored on both sides. If an employee gives 2 weeks, they’re often just walked out the door and stay on the payroll for 2 weeks (for any job more complex than menial tasks, no meaningful transition can be completed in 2 weeks, so it’s better to reduce any risks immediately). Companies often give severance packages longer than 2 weeks to avoid being sued, on condition of signing some paperwork to that effect.

The company needs to bite the bullet to secure a short-term contract that stipulates certain things need to be done on a (expensive) fixed-cost basis. No reason to expect any of these employees to work the same way anymore, and they might even present some risk, so extra carrot is needed to keep them around for critical duties and hand-over.

> If I were asked back I'd take it

Since the workers mostly aren't actually fired, but in a no-access, no-duties period between notice and dismissal while still employed and on payroll, its “resume duties, quit, or be fired for cause”.

How it looked in his head:

Swoop in to the sounds of Jan Hammer’s Crocketts Theme with his Tesla staff entourage, you’re fired you’re fired, sit down, hack the planet, job done, planet bows before him, free speech restored.

How it turned out:

“Um, boss, we’ve spent the last three days trying to get a build running in Jenkins. Might want to get the dudes you fired back.”. While all the advertisers distance themselves from the unravelling incel, racist, sexist shit show.

The guy’s a fucking idiot. Nothing else to it.

The world's full of them though. I don't really get the passion behind the anti-Elon camp. It sounds personal. Isn't it just some billionaire doing what they do?

It does feel unnaturally influenced, I agree. Follow the money, I suppose.

Who stands to gain from twitter and/or elons failure? We can speculate for fun. Certainly Bill Gates, with his half billion short on Tesla. He'd have the money to influence social media. We already know Microsoft games HN from when the CEO was bragging about it to shareholders. So it can be done.

Who else? Oil and Gas probably hate him for Teslas battery tech.

The entire automotive industry would be interested in piling on.

... NASA? That doesn't seem like them but who knows.

Everyone on twitter who already hated him would be doubling down.

I figure most are just secretly jealous. I am.

Not even slightly jealous. The guy purports to be solving the greatest problems humanity has in some kind of altruistic way. But really he’s built a company selling luxury electric cars to the top 5% which allow us to carry on our bad behaviour for a few more years in a new way. At the same time trying to crush worker rights and sell out to China.

I'm jealous of the ability that he has to do whatever he wants, not the means by which he does it.

I'm over here expecting to lose my house as interest rates crank up, barely able to afford daycare and he's what, pissing off easily upset internet people while doing literally whatever he pleases?

I'm jealous of the power.

I can assure you my disdain spans more than just Musk.

Yeah but they're keeping out of the news at the minute. There's no need for whataboutism imo, they're all pricks, but at the moment it's Musk (and Zuckerberg) failing hard.

It's the unrealised promise or illusion, at least for me. I was a huge fan of him, mostly due to SpaceX, and still follow bigger events or announcements regarding his company. But he really disappointed me with his personal opinions and management practices, multiple times, even before Twitter debacle.

On the other hand I don't have any hopes for Bezos or some Comcast or BP billionaires as an example, so they don't disappoint me much :)

Can't wait to see the HN "just give Elon a chance to put his brilliant plans in motion!" crowd to explain this one to us. Enlighten us please !

HN seems pretty anti Elon, no?

I can’t speak for the rest of HN, but his childish narcissistic megalomania certainly rubs me the wrong way.

Depending on the thread it can go either way. There are large contingents on both sides as Musk is quite divisive.

Yeah fair enough, two sides to everything. Anecdotally I feel like I see a lot of Elon hate, but that could just be my decency bias due to Twitter drama and layoffs.

I'm seeing the same thing here on HN. People are frothing at the mouth to hate on him. Wild speculation all over.

Case in point, the HN trope that he is an idiot and doesn't know anything about technology and just takes credit for brilliant engineers' work. I laid out solid evidence that is not true, quoting top of the field scientist and engineers' assessment of his technical knowledge and skills. The only response I get is from RavingGoat (username kind of checks out) claiming Elon must have paid these people to say these things with no evidence whatsoever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33504228

I know this is cliche here, but in this case, it really seems like Redditors have invaded this space.

It varies. I’ve been a SpaceX (and thus Elon) fan since they were unsuccessfully launching Falcon 1’s. EM’s willingness to share information with the space fan community won him a lot of admirers. I was certainly willing to overlook many of his other failings as a result.

That’s become harder in the last few years and practically impossible in 2022. At this point, I am desperately hoping for SpaceX to get Starship/Superheavy flying before Elon manages to screw that up as well.

I’m not a trained psychiatric professional but it looks to me as if his extreme wealth and success has exacerbated some pre-existing tendencies and turned him into a (danger, medical jargon ahead) full-blown mess. It’s a shame to watch.

what are the other things he is screwing up?

He poorly handled his insistence on Tesla (and other?) staff return to working in the office.

It seems like he has screwed up being a parent to his many children, most publicly the one that transitioned and cut off ties with him.

Endless announcements and mispredictions are what aggravates me the most, borderline fraud IMO. I am not so much disliking him for it, I think he's a little neurodivergent and it's not exactly his fault, but it makes me really sad there's never consequences and that so many people believe him again and again, it seems like there is some easily exploitable missing BS detector in a significant amount of the population.

He's a lot like Trump in that he jumps into everything declaring it simple and that he gets it unlike everyone else, then says it turns out this is more complicated than anyone thought.

> what are the other things he is screwing up?

Not much. His public feuding and conspiracy theory spreading is largely constrained to Twitter. The whole thing going under might be the best outcome for him. Presently, however, he’s acting like an addict given the crack store.

"Cybertruck"

That's basically where I'm at. I don't dislike or resent Musk, although I can see why others do. I'm just disappointed in him. At a time when positive role models are needed, he's letting his self-destructive freak flag fly. He obviously isn't getting the therapeutic support that he (by his own admission) needs.

I'm sure some of us have parents or grandparents who worked for Howard Hughes back in the day, and are now feeling a strong sense of deja vu. Musk seems to be speedrunning Hughes' career and, really, his entire life.

I'm not sure what the "elon support" split on HN is, but in the past it seems to have been rather 50/50.

I suspect that HN has recently seemed more anti-elon because the anti-elon crowd has a lot of bullshit to point to recently, and the pro-elon crowd doesn't really have good defenses to most of it.

Most “pro-Elon” people who are not completely brainwashed have had lots of reasons to re-evaluate their opinion of him recently. People are not static and can have changing emotions.

There was tons of excitement over the years about his companies transforming the world and his successes there have been spectacular.

But over the past few years he’s become much more vocal about current events unrelated to his companies. He has every right to do it, but whether you’re a cable news commentator or Musk, the more you weigh in on social issues the more polarizing you become.

Reality has an anti-Elon bias.

Musk has an anti-reality bias

A man has to be full of great melancholies to accomplish what he has. This clearly has positive and negative sides. Judging from the accomplishments of great people throughout history you cannot have one without the other.

In the case of Twitter something had to be done. It was too powerful of a public forum and was mismanaged and run by extremists and exacerbated existing divisions, turning them into real rifts. If half a country feels they are being actively suppressed, demonized, and treated unfairly that is a recipe for disaster. Was Elon the guy to fix it? I dunno who else would be crazy enough to try. And his roots are in web tech so his experience may help.

People are idolized, their accomplishments embellished, and their shortcomings overlooked when they are in positions of power and prestige. Often times the role of sheer luck, cronyism and connections are completely downplayed

What did he accomplish? Like personally he himself? There is a very specific agenda/propaganda to sell this hard-working, aspiring CEO image (well predating Musk) which I could never justify. They are just megalomaniac narcissists with an extraordinary luck (that is way too downplayed) and sometimes some redeeming quality at least (in the form of some charm, or leadership). Well, I couldn’t list any such for Elon here, but even if I could, why are we worshipping these people? They ain’t working 25 hours each day, the secret to their success is not that early morning yoga whatever and sleeping 2 hours in the office. As I mentioned, luck’s role is way downplayed. It is not too hard to make much money from already much money.

I guess one way to view successful entrepreneurship is the ability to increase your chance to be lucky.

That's what lucky people say.

I very much hope most everyone is anti billionaire-(for the time being)-manchilds-who-regularly-throws-tantrums-on-twitter-and-who-is-so-egomaniac-that-he-had-to-buy-the-title-founder-for-a-company-(which otherwise lives on government subsidies)-he-only-pumped-money-into-largely-seeded-by-daddy’s-emerald-mine.

No, if anti, then anti Musk. I'm not on first-name terms with narcissists.

From the moment that he started to fight off this purchase in court, it's needed a lot of mental gymnastics to defend the genius of his moves regarding the purchase of an underperforming social network.

Are these the plays of a proverbial multi-dimensional chess genius that are beyond mortal ken, or one clumsy attempt after another to salvage a bad situation that he put himself in?

In some other HN thread related to this, people worked out the math behind the layoff of half of Twitter's workforce days into taking over: assuming revenue remained the same, the company would be profitable enough to cover the loans taken to purchase (with itself as collateral!)

Actually, this is in line with the philosophy at Tesla's/Elon companies of "if you're not occasionally replacing components you deleted, then you aren't removing enough."

The best employees is no employee.

Reducing expenses probably looks nice in quarterly reports.

The irony is the goal of taking Twitter private was precisely to avoid the tyranny of quarterly reports.

Tuning a guitar string often involves going too low and then raising back up to the right note. Disruptive to the workers, but Musk is tuning a guitar not running a daycare - requirements and concerns are different. I’m sure he’s less worried about the optics of correction than you are. Add your own value judgements accordingly.

Personally I can’t make myself see this as a humanitarian disaster — these employees have known the risk was on the horizon for many months, are eminently employable, high-functioning, with presumably good professional networks and resumes. They’ll land on their feet, and have themselves to blame if they didn’t prepare accordingly. Plenty of other drama in the world to worry about, much of it more severe than ex-twitter ee’s on the open job market thirsty for talent.

Elon is an intense narcissist so he absolutely cares how bad it looks. I am more worried about the workers who are still stuck there rather than the ones who were let go. It will be total chaos for quite awhile there before it settles into whatever former shell of itself , stuffed with ads and sponsored scams, it's on track to become, a depressing place to work for anyone with a conscience.

I mean yeah some reorganizations were probably needed, but he seems to take a shotgun approach to it. Fire half the people, whip the leftovers into making a new feature to be done within days, shun the actual people using the platform by removing their verification, demanding payment, and having them banned anyway when they cause him butthurt, etc.

He could've done all that much more smoothly. Now though, Twitter is spiraling.

“This is why Elon is a genius for keeping these employees on staff for 3 months instead of laying them off; now he can just get them back to work or they refuse and he saves 3 months of salary!”

I personally can't wait for the high strung emotions on both sides to die out. There are people that actively cheer for Elon to fail and to take the entire company with him, and others that actively hope he's going to single-handedly restore free speech.

Meanwhile.. it's a corporation that trades in short messages between it's users. Is any of this really worth the emotional investment? It's an odd time in America, but casting all your hopes and dreams through the lens of what Elon Musk does today or where Twitter is tomorrow seems to me to be the worst way to approach it.

The fact that there's a new, highly upvoted post about Twitter every few hours on this site is ridiculous. I'm waiting for it to pass I guess.

How do you know this is legitimate news?

This article says they are trying to bring back "dozens" of employees. 3700 were fired. Of those apparently some were fired due to clerical error. What is there to explain?

There is a bunch of mass layoffs happening in other tech companies (and across the economy), are we going to pretend they will all go smoothly?

Actually come to think of it, without this acquisition Twitter would still have been forced to let a bunch of people go anyhow regardless of who happens to be the CEO. Possibly just as many. Probably with less severance... but definitely with nicer emails...

Take a deep breath.

Fired due to clerical error! That’s a new one, and quite motivating for the employee who is no longer fired.

It is absolutely not a new one. Welcome to planet earth. Read some Kafka.

I'm not sure if you're trying to defend twitter, but if you are, I absolutely love that you're doing it by calling it a Kafkian company!

Somebody caught it ;)

Kafka wrote fiction. And was mentally unwell. I do like his writing, actually, but his books are not proof of anything.

Nobody else is cutting 50%, and the twitter severance isn't particularly generous either relative to other layoffs.

The other tech companies are still wildly profitable, Twitter is losing money. The severance is generous relative to company finances I'd say. Heck for some it is more than a Walmart greeter makes in a whole year actually working..

Eventbrite cut 50% during covid btw.

> Twitter is losing money

Most of Twitter's current losses are the interested payment on Musk's leveraged buyout.

> Eventbrite cut 50% during covid btw

I'm shocked that a company whose business plan revolves around groups of people meeting in person had financial trouble during the pandemic.

Dozens of employees, some of which may be essential to critical operations if they are in fact this desperate to get them back. If Twitter is down for 24 hours because they fired the three people that know the affected subsystem the best, the "it's only dozens out of 5700" proportion says nothing about actual business impact.

Har! A fail whale is close, I too can feel it. Yet to spot one tho, best keep your eyes peeled matey.

Surely normal people like us can't possibly understand the 5D chess Elon plays.

The pro-Elon redpill here is that he's already had at least 4 unambiguously successful companies (zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX). So maybe we are just observing what it takes to be extremely successful: Move fast and break stuff. If you want to be a multibillionaire you're going to have to make a lot of big mistakes, faster than anyone thinks possible.

Additionally I think "verified users get priority in replies" has the potential to be absolutely killer. Everyone knows that clout chasing is huge on Twitter. I could easily see a spiral like so:

* Initially 5% of daily actives buy the check marks, mostly just to own the libs (Fox News loves Elon btw). But the newborn blue checks are everywhere in replies. They're accumulating followers like no tomorrow.

* Others begin to follow suit. $8/month is a small price to pay for clout. Remember, that's what they're all there for. "If anyone tells you they don't want more twitter followers, they're lying."

* 10% of the userbase has bought a blue check. 20%. The anti-Elon folks are holding out. But their voices are growing quieter and quieter.

* The entire tenor of the site begins to change. The loudest voices are the Elon fans who bought the check mark early. His politics become dominant on the site.

* Eventually the anti-Elon folks either ragequit or end up purchasing the checkmark. Petty tyranny and clout chasing are kind of their thing. It's a case of irresistible force meets immovable object. Endgame seems hard to predict.

You missed one: * Russia buys Blue for all of their Twitter bot-farms, giving Twitter tons of extra income, and Russia even better influence over US voters.

$8 should be plenty sufficient to cover some sort of identity verification service -- assuming possession of a distinct US credit card number isn't sufficient on its own. (Could make it so if you mouse over a checkmark, it displays a flag based on what country the payment for the account originates from.)

Additionally, I don't believe bot detection is an inherently hard problem. And if every bot detected means the bot creator has to pay another $8 for their next bot, then bot detection becomes profitable for Twitter.

I doubt this ends up being the cheapest way for Russia to influence US elections.

I am not giving up my identity to continue being a Don Hughes reply guy.

Did you see how hard Elon tried to get out of the Twitter deal? Remember how he made up fake excuses about bots to try and torpedo the merger? Even Elon doesn't think Elon can make the Twitter deal work.

We don't know for sure that's why he tried to get out of the deal. Maybe he decided he actually wanted to focus on Tesla/SpaceX, or was trying to gain leverage for a lower acquisition price.

If he didn't think he could improve on the status quo for Twitter, the thing to do would be to trim as much staff as possible to cut costs and then continue with the current ad revenue based model, without making any changes or introducing new features. Twitter was making on the order of $5B/year in ad revenue. Pushing costs below $5B/year should not be difficult given the nature of the service provided.

Alternatively, if what you say is true and he doesn't think he can make it work, he could try to "back out" by flipping Twitter to another buyer, or just take it public again. Revealed preferences suggest he thinks he can outperform those alternatives.

Here's DHH's take.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...

" the focus on the customer.... is uncannily similar."

what is he smoking? Musk literally banned the head of a major advertising organization concerned about where Musk was taking the site in terms of it being friendly to advertising (https://www.axios.com/2022/11/06/musk-twitter-marketers-adve...). Read Josh Marshall's thread at https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1588679838306799617. Musk is absolutely doing everything the customer does not want (the customer being: advertisers), and they have already ran for the exits.

I would love to listen in on those negotiations.

If you’re reading this, and Twitter wants you back, I hope you ask for a contract with a year’s pay in advance, due before returning to work, at 10x your prior rate.

After all, you must be one of those 10x developers if Elon is willing to eat crow and ask you to come back.

Just having those emails in hand would be almost a voucher for negotiating higher salary when looking for another job, they certify that you were one of the people that were vital for Twitter to run.

Being asked to go back just means it's cheaper to get you to return than it is to recruit someone to do your old job.

> Being asked to go back just means it's cheaper to get you to return than it is to recruit someone to do your old job.

Only at your old rate.

For software, the existing employees will always be cheaper. It has been argued that an engineers value is captured most in their mental model of the system. EG: Want a new feature in a system I built and maintained? Boom, here are the touch points, the gotchyas, and here is the roadmap to get if done in three days. Anyone new to that system will first say, cool, give me about 3 weeks to learn this code, and then maybe another 7 while we implement it and work through all of the trip wires we did not know about.

And firing them was just an insanely dumb thing significantly increasing expenses.

There’s likely no negotiations. More of a “could you come back please?” And you either accept because you don’t have anything lined up or tell them to go pound sand

Well, if they are indeed that important to the company, then they do have quite a large leverage.

I'm 99% confident that anyone with Twitter on their resumè will have no problems landing another job.

100% confident that anyone who are called back because they were essential will have absolutely no problems

Sounds familiar. Where I worked years ago, the company asked for volunteers to be laid off, many people, took the package (1 years salary). IT was not allowed to volunteer.

Mang. did not keep count, some Departments were emptied out. So after a couple of weeks, many people were re-hired and was able to keep their '1 year salary bonus'.

Many people in IT left once the re-hirings happened. The company went chapter 11 about 5 years later.

Accept to leave for 1 year salary? I’d do that any time. It’s a free year off, you can even start working somewhere else if you get bored and just be 1 year ahead finance wise.

That’s a great deal.

Plus generally speaking, changing jobs will get you a raise as well.

Yeah, sounds like a company desperate to reduce the metric of ongoing operating cost, no matter what it did to anything else. I would guess private equity shenanigans.

see the top comments.

"Allegedly Oracle did this years ago when they had layoffs-- employees were let go, then asked if they wanted to return. Apparently, if they said no, the company considered the exit a resignation instead of a layoff, and would refuse severance. If oracle was then taken to court over the lack of severance by former employees, those employees' refusal to rejoin the company could be used to avoid an unfavorable ruling for Oracle."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488447

Are you suggesting that Elon Musk is the new Larry Ellison?

Elon and Larry are close friends.

They sound rather similar these days.

I'd be happy if I stop hearing about Twitter and it's alternatives.

I don’t mean to be snarky, but the solution is exercising self restraint. The world will continue on just fine if you stop engaging with the topic.

Agreed. It's extremely easy to ignore all news regarding this topic - leaving a comment stating that it's difficult says more about the commenter itself.

Not everybody gets their news or hackernews links the same way you do.

If part of the fitness criteria involved printing out code written in the last 6 months on paper, it was predictable that they would have accidentally let go of many important contributors in a 50% layoff. Color me not surprised.

Turns out running a large technology platform takes more than just wishful thinking and personal brand stunts.

It was pretty obvious from the speed of the layoffs that this would happen. No way they would be able to accurately suss out everyone that would be needed in a few days. They prioritised speed over accuracy, which I can actually respect. Question is how hard it's going to bite them.

So they hastily, after one week, laid off 50% of their staff, but it took just one weekend to realize that some of those people are needed? I guess they were really missed at Twitter, but this is not exactly the sign of a well run company.

https://archive.ph/VLCqz

"Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves"

https://archive.ph/VLCqz

What I like about this is that Elon apparently made this call by counting SLOCs printed on paper, and then stack ranked them. Clearly the man is a genius, and he will save Twitter.

You cannot audit performance at a software company by SLOC. In fact, its a great way to drive up hardware costs and salaries.

I stand by my previous statement about stack ranking: It does not fucking work. EVER. Fire low performers if you must but don't turn them on each other.

Does this seem a surprising mis-step for a guy who has run multiple companies before, even succesful ones? Or I guess maybe this is actually pretty typical, you can't lay off that much of your company without making some big mistakes you try to reverse? (But still... this isn't Musk's first rodeo, right? Why does it seem like he doens't know what he's doing?)

Can we now, at long last, kill the myth that Elon Musk is a business genius?

Not just yet.

I realized Elon wasn't a scientist or engineer a long time ago. But a good businessman I thought he was and I think it's too early to say in this case whether that holds true. One issue is that since the company is now private, we most likley will not get to see it's profit. All we will have is what employees or musk says. So I still think it's too soon to make conclusions.

Sure, but I’m really interested to see what he does with http://x.com

He wants to make a WeChat, but WeChat can only happen because Apple allows WeChat to bend the rules so it can access the Chinese market.

He’s just a young Donald trump

I’m don’t fall into one camp or the other: I think the guy is human, like everyone else, and riddled with faults.

But one guy has put humans into space, and the other sold steaks on infomercials.

That's quite the slanted framing.

An alternate framing: one was president of the United States and one got pushed down a flight of stairs for making fun of a kid because his father committed suicide.

But as a businessman, Musk has done far more for society with SpaceX and Starlink than Trump ever did as a sketchy real estate developer, or media personality. Let's give that to Musk, not withstanding his dubious personal choices, polarizing public persona, or this questionable decision of buying and then gutting an unprofitable social network.

I framed it this way because GP was make a pejorative comparison.

The twitter bankruptcy will be a very public process.

90% of Twitter's revenue comes from ads. Advertisers are reportedly abandoning the platform en masse, and the rest will follow once Musk does his next stupid thing.

No amount of layoffs is going to cover the dissolution of their revenue basis. Twitter will become a thing of the past, like MySpace.

No good businessperson runs around as half-cocked in bright, broad daylight as this guy. I’ve heard plenty of large fund managers say he’s too overboard to take seriously enough to invest in his businesses.

I agree with you. It's simple - if you're against Musk, you're against the betterment of humanity.

I have very strong, very mixed feelings about Musk and am not sure if he is a great businessmen or not. However, I did appreciate DHH's blog post about Job's returning to Apple. Massive layoffs and Jobs admitted that mistakes will be made, but at least decisions are being made. Short worthwhile read: https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...

Edit: auto-correct typo

I wish the Elon anti-fans would wait for Elon fans to say something, then respond to them, rather than posting 900 comments picking fights with people who haven't even posted yet. This obsession with adoring or condemning love-hate branded celebrities as quickly and loudly as possible is unbelievably grating.

I thought the hyperloop was that moment but in fairness he managed to get investment for that shit.

It seems that this website asked me to accept cookies with a Pop up that covers the whole screen (mobile) after accepting (only apparently option) it was still behind a subscription.

Could HN parse links and put how many cookies each website is trying to force you to accept?

Turn off Javascript, and possibly CSS and you can read it. (I browse the web now with both off by default)

Apparently, I seem to be grossly out of touch with all this twitter-related drama. Can someone please explain why the events surrounding twitter acquisition are such a newsmaker?

What does it matter who owns the company and who the company fires? You can still (re)post the messages, you can still read the messages. All the favorite 'content-generators' are still there. Not much has changed from the users' perspective, everything works just fine.

I mean. A few memes - why not? A casual discussion - maybe. Rage and daily news titles about some internal decisions - what is this, '16 and pregnant'?

And what about this 'looking for twitter alternatives' crap? What for?

I feel like these low-effort topics pull the worst out of the community.

> And what about this 'looking for twitter alternatives' crap?

Well every opportunity is good to try to promote your network, isn't it?

So maybe 36 out of 3700?

Hopefully all the shit show will lead to the fast decline of Twitter, maybe a new interest in decentralized social media.

Come back to twitter work to rule while everyone else runs around freaking out? What are they going to do? Fire you again?

Whatever happened to the WARN lawsuits against Musk? How is he allowed to layoff 40-50% of staff with zero notice?

Do they apply since they are still being paid?

Lawsuits take more than 1 week. They are coming, in time. Unfortunately, their only penalty is monetary. So the answer to your latter question is "he can pay the fine."

He's paying 3 months severance.

So when he's bragging that severance is larger than it had to be, it's basically a lie?

Yes

If it's 3 months severance, doesn't seem like he's lying.

> WARN protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring employers to give a 60-day notice

https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

because severance covers the WARN period

tweeps understandably upset but if he is really offering to buy them a horse I think that is more than fair?

It's not about fairness, it's about Musk making terrible decisions.

Twitter has lost its prestige. Is there any company in the world that could fill this void?

I don't know how we can all believe a lot of the saga and news that is coming out of Twitter. After all the misinformation and trolls (pretending to be laid off employees) and culture of misinformation and manipulation we can trust much of the media coming out on Twitter.

From what I've been told, this is common at large companies. Lay off staff then hire them back as contractors.

California is one of the strictest states around the contractor / employee designation.

I’m not sure of all the rules but I think working more than 20hrs or getting the majority of your contractor income from a single source raises a lot of flags.

Surely it would have been more remarkable if a company lays off 3,700 employees and exactly zero mistakes are made. A company like Twitter is impossibly complex, and it's very likely that some number of people are legitimately important, but their importance cannot be seen from a top-down view.

I see it as a healthy sign that Twitter management are rapidly identifying and rectifying any missteps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com