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Comment by thijser | Hacker News Reader

Funny that the all-time most upvoted HN story about Twitter is "Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Apparently the directive to not work from home anymore came in the middle of the workday for European Tweeps: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590623323611799553?...

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Update: HR has been caught completely off-guard by Musk's email, I am told. They are scrambling to put together a formal policy and communications, as there is none.

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590721798647459843

Yes? It's Elon's company to make these decisions and then tell the world so that his internal folks can see what he wants from Twitter.

Elon is using the Trump playbook. With the difference being, he also owns the mouthpiece.

At a normal company, the decision maker would let the team who needs to do work know privately ahead of time so that they could prepare a coherent process, then make the announcement internally to employees. "Heads up HR! We're getting rid of remote work. You have N hours to come up with a plan and communication strategy." Even that's shitty, it would be better to give them a few days instead of hours, but at least it gives HR time to figure things out.

Here, he just blew past that and surprised everyone. It's as if your Product exec sent an all-hands E-mail saying "Everyone, we're now going to focus on PROJECT_A and drop all other projects!" as your team is checking in code for PROJECT_B. I've seen it happen and it's shitty.

Twitter was not, and is not now a normal company. Elon does not follow the rules of wisdom when running a company.

I worked at Google when suddenly the head of my divsion said that social was the 100% priority for the company and we should all think how to make our systems better at social. Came as a big surprise to everybody because we worked in cloud. At some point Larry was pleading with senior engineers at TGIF to support his social mission. Eventually the social crap was canned and the company refocused back on other things.

I never had the chance to tell Urs that his ursquake and ursquake2 email were not well-thought out.

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