Twitter is now asking some fired workers to please come back | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is now asking some fired workers to please come back

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30 pointsljahier20 comments

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I suspect that they ran into something like,

"Hey, none of the batch jobs ran today because of DST changeover, and we fired the batch jobs team"

Steve Jobs returning to Apple meant layoffs, but it was a month later. After analysis and planning.

He didn't do it on the same day, while carrying a sink into the office.

Elon is a showman. Constantly overpromising on things that don't exist.

In this case, he's allowed himself to be fooled by his cheering twitter fanbase. But it's not as real as he thinks.

While I totally sympathize with the schadenfreude, I won't be surprised if Elon himself fully expected to do this. They still end up with fewer workers than they had before and now know for certain they people they hired back were indeed important for day-to-day functioning. Faster process than going through each employee's job function individually. And I won't be surprised if the severance terms were structured such that those refusing to come back now before signing their severance offers, are considered to be quitting and hence don't get their severance pay. But IANAL so not certain of that.

Oh c'mon, this is not an Elon galaxy brain move. They could've just slowly laid off people instead.

And no, people got fired on the spot, some with dubious cause and against state labor laws.

A slow layoff is terrible for morale. Much better to cut deep then bump the salaries/reward the ones that stay. A drawn-out layoff is a great way to lose top talent as uncertainty is stressful and they will begin interviewing elsewhere.

The layoff emails on Twitter had a January separation date and severance would come later this week.

No surprise - there was no way for them to do proper planning within the short time they made the decision.

If true not surprised. It’s also not a thing that is unique to Twitter.

True, but few ceos make a big public stink about how overstuffed the company is, abruptly and arbitrarily fire half the staff a few days in, with almost no notice, then are like oh wait…

I don't have the data, but I think what usually happens is more people leave (ie put in their two weeks) once they see everyone get fired.

Why not do something less humiliating and just go back out to the market for new engineers under a banner like

"Twitter looking for a new breed of engineers to build fresh original capabilities"

Or something...

They probably want submissive workers that just do what they are told and are easily exploited. It might be a good strategy if you want loyal yes-men and get rid of those skeptical of Elon.

some additional context, they don't seem picky about who can return either:

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1589075543420325888

"sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4PM PST Sunday."

Assuming that’s an accurate quote, I wouldn’t say it’s fair to describe it as not being “picky”. Returning candidates are self-selecting by whether they want to return (good for corporate morale) and then only if they can rationalise the value of their role in a way that convinces Twitter execs/HR.

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.

> A company like Twitter is impossibly complex

And that's precisely why you take care in making decisions (like layoffs) and understand the business landscape (advertising), instead of shooting from the hip and surrounding yourself with yes-men.

How many people would go back to a job that had fired them? not sure I would

I would assume this might have to die with WARN acts?

I'd assume Musk planned on just eating any settlement. This looks like the few people that are left and supposedly sleep in the building can't do all the things required to keep Twitter operating.

I mean, they fired their entire SRE team. That alone will cause things to fall over and be left unfixed.

"You might also like Margin Call (2011)."

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