Elon Musk gives Twitter staff deadline to commit to being ‘hardcore’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is all over twitter, one of the biggest tech stories in a long time while very relevant to corporate culture in general - but there´s almost dead silence here?
That said the story and musk shenanigans in general is also quite annoying at this point.
For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 where dang has a "overheated discussion detector" to try to give things a chance to cool off.
Too much material on a single topic likely also gets down rated (similar to how posts about politics get less visibility).
Note that there's also a secret page of /pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool ) that has articles that are considered for being given a second shot.
Not everybody cares to hear a play by play of every inappropriate fart that Elon Musk passes.
Finally the first piece of good news coming out of Twitter. Why didn’t he just start with this email rather than anonymously laying off half the company and picking fights with engineers on Twitter, though now I guess people have a crystal clear picture of the culture they’re choosing to stay at, it would have been much more humane to start with this.
Sounds like a lot of people will choose this path, I wonder how many will be left.
https://fortune.com/2022/11/14/elon-musk-only-exceptional-tw...
He said exceptional is the baseline and only exceptional twitter employees can work from home, ergo all employees can work from home.
As for what it does in this case... we'll see. Will he get a bunch of superhero 10x programmers sleeping under their desks? Or will all the superheroes leave, reducing him to the ones who are afraid of finding a new job and being bad at it until he fires them?
Thus far he seems all stick and no carrot, but perhaps he's got something up his sleeve.
On the other hand, Eddie Lampert used a weird libertarian method and ran Sears into the ground.
I think there's a lot of survivor bias in how business leaders are treated.
But hailed by who in this case? Himself?
Imagine employees getting this survey and thinking I want to get out but what if this is trap? By opting for leaving I would be outing myself as not 'hardcore'.
Mr. Musk gets a database of self declared 'disengaged' employees. He chooses to scrap the offer (there is no legal binding) and then over next few months pressures them to quit without any severance.
Nightmare!
Hard to think that those writing great code would be open to be abused, giving how in demand their skills are.
Are they? The layoffs in tech have been... extensive. Engineers are more in demand than journalists right now, but the climate now is pretty dubious compared with only a few months ago.
Does severance include any upcoming stock grants? If no, could be another reason to try and stick it out hoping for some sanity to prevail.
what causes people to perceive this as "abuse", a "toxic environment", a "nightmare", rather than plain ol' leadership?
are we so far gone as a society that wanting to improve things through hard work is just a completely foreign concept to us now?
what the fuck happened in these past few years to make us this way?
why have we been programmed to believe that putting hard work into making something great is a bad thing?
this was not the case a few short years ago.
again: what the fuck happened?
With that out of the way, I think hard work is great. Making something cool is what gets me up and to work every day. What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours." To me, that implies having to work for more than a typical work day and with little slack for any hiccups. Add to that the expectation that anything less than "exceptional performance" is a failing grade. Taken together it strikes me as a recipe for burnout and anxiety. At a minimum I don't see how it's possible to have any sort of work life balance in that arrangement.
Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter. I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations. Of course fairness has nothing to do with it, it's Elon's company. Still, that doesn't maen he's free from criticism.
Many things can be true simultaneously. Many of the Elon criticisms are valid: Cruel and puerile behavior on Twitter, shockingly bad product decisions that any associate PM would avoid. Many of the criticisms are unclear: dismantling of teams like "Responsible AI," which sounds like a navel-gazing college course, not an organization in a company. Many of the criticisms are stupid: Cutting free meals that nobody was eating, implementing return-to-office.
I'm observing a noticeable societal shift that I have directly experienced occurring within my lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that this shift is wholly organic. like I said elsewhere in the thread, this demoralization and disintegration of innately self-evident core values like "working hard to make a good thing good is good" is exactly how I would poison the well of an adversarial nation that I wanted to destabilize at the foundational level.
it's quite nice to see some pushback against this.
> What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours."
> Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter.
I'm confused. you're an indie game developer, and I don't know the details of your team and project, but that entire field is basically built on hard work, long hours, high-intensity effort, and yet you find it fulfilling, despite the great personal risk usually associated, especially being indie.
so why do you think it's impossible that someone else would find a job of this level of intensity but cranked up a notch, but compensated for with a large salary and lavish benefits, to be a compelling job prospect? like I'm with you, that proposition doesn't sound like a great personal fit for me, either—but why is it unthinkable that anyone would find the job compelling? you know as well as I do that, on some level, the entire video game development industry "preys on" developers' love of the medium and feeling of satisfaction caused by creating something cool after oftentimes plural years of development before having a concrete product to show for all the work you put into it. why is that OK for the video game industry, but not for social media companies?
> I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations.
I can see this, but also, how long was the Musk buyout deal in the works? how many months? of course, all the while, almost literally everyone on HN told themselves and everyone else, over and over again in comments threads, the deal will never happen, there's no way it'll go through, ahaha look at this new roadblock that came up, Elon will never get past this one! (seriously, go back in the archives and take a look at some of those threads, the self-assured self-righteous agreement that the deal would never happen is pretty crazy to look back on now.)
any Twitter employee who was ideologically opposed to Elon Musk had plenty of time to look for another job in the case that he actually completed the buyout. of course I'm sympathetic to anyone suddenly losing their job, to some extent, but this sympathy is balanced out somewhat by vindication at seeing bloated "tech companies" finally getting some fat trimmed such that someone who works at a company like Twitter—making much more money than I do at my job—actually has to work hard to earn the paycheck and benefits they enjoy.
I mean... he literally tried to weasel his way out of the purchase agreement until it became clear that the courts weren't going to let that happen? I'm not sure this is the dunk you seem to think it is.
is it not interesting when hundreds of people are absolutely convinced that something is impossible, and then it happens anyway? is that not cause for reflection and introspection, to figure out how so many people could be wrong about something? is that not just standard operating procedure for anyone who makes any sort of prediction/assertion that turns out to be inaccurate, in order to assess things more accurately in the future?
again, taking a step back and reflecting on things can lead to the discovery of such patterns repeated across recent history, which leads to key insights about how and why these overemotional public melodramas play out the way they do.
Working hard is necessary to make something good, of course. Working "hardcore", where 100-hour weeks are _required_, and only "exceptional" performance is acceptable, is _inhuman_.
I'm saying this as someone who's managed several teams over several years, but also someone who's read the literature: the surest way to get bad performance out of someone is to put that kind of pressure on them, _especially_ long-term. People in that situation get tired and/or sick, can't straight from the anxiety and pressure, and because of all of that that they'll make simple mistakes that take a long time to sort out (because everybody else is in the same situation).
In my experience the best work comes from people who are calm, healthy, and well-rested, _especially_ over the long term. Those well-rested people are the ones who are capable of putting in the discretionary effort to make something good.
this is something you and everyone else read into the email that was simply not written there. out of curiosity, what drives you to take "hardcore" and "this will mean working long hours" just about as exaggeratedly, hyperbolically uncharitably possible? I can't find a valid logical reason for doing this, yet everyone seems to be doing it, and I can't figure it out.
I know my value and won't work in that type of environment.
Why in the world would you find it acceptable to work at a place where the baseline is extreme hours and where extreme hours are required for just an acceptable performance review if you have other options?
I have worked extreme hours in many jobs but that has always been because either it was an exceptional situation or I was doing it of my own accord. Other than those two situations the only other reason I would do it is either:
1 I am working at a startup (preferably it's my own or I own a lot of equity)
2 I needed the job that badly
3 There was some "higher mission" associated with the work (eg manned space travel to mars, rushing to find a vaccine)
2 doesn't apply to twitter engineers and 3 certainly doesn't apply since twitter whose "higher mission" is selling ads.
A global pandemic that empowered workers to advocate for themselves? There is a difference between 'hard work' and working more than 40 hours a week.
Perhaps instead of calling it 'hard work' you should call it what it is: Stealing. There's a reason why people fought violently for eight hour work days.
telling Twitter employees to work hard and possibly for long hours at their well-paying job with apparently tons of great benefits is not the same thing as telling Industrial Revolution minimum-wage poor-working-conditions steel mill workers or whatever that they have to work 80 hours a week or get fired, yet that seems to be the lens you're viewing this through, which greatly confuses me.
I understand that you likely have a wholly different political lens in general that you view the world through, compared to myself (and most other people), but still, it's not really a gulag or concentration camp if you're being paid upwards of $100k a year (and can freely leave to find a different job if at any point you don't like the way things are going!), so any allusions in that vein are hard to take seriously.
> "and possibly for long hours"
Why did you add the word possibly? The email explicitly says "this will mean working long hours".
(I think work ethic and long hours are totally fine! But if a billionaire comes in, fires half of his staff, and then says the remaining ones need to work long hours to make his company a success... we can just acknowledge that, without softening his message.)
Because if you're working long hours and not getting proper overtime pay for those hours then yes you are being cheated out of pay. And companies bleed employees when they do things like this for a reason: Because they can get similar or better pay with better working hours. It's a worker's market right now and you better believe people are going to take advantage of it.
> it's effectively wage theft when a company forces you to work long grueling hours for the same rates and it steals years off of your personal life to feed the ambitions of an insane CEO.
> Perhaps instead of calling it 'hard work' you should call it what it is: Stealing.
you're explicitly stating that the standards that Elon Musk is setting for his employees, just by saying "this will mean working long hours", are unilaterally, inherently unjust.
when you work at an hourly pay rate and your boss/supervisor tells you to work more hours than usual at no additional pay, that is obviously exploitative.
salaried positions are completely different, and it is disingenuous to pretend like this is not the case. it is true that the social contract between Twitter employees and their employer is in the process of changing, but that is being made explicit to the employees, and they are being asked to either agree to the changes or leave the company.
what exactly is wrong with this?
where exactly is the "labor theft"?
> And companies bleed employees when they do things like this for a reason: Because they can get similar or better pay with better working hours. It's a worker's market right now and you better believe people are going to take advantage of it.
and that is absolutely fine! there is absolutely no reason why a Twitter employee who does not agree to the new terms put forth by their boss should stay with the company. and there's nothing compelling them to do so!
but why should those who do agree to the new terms like shamed or told their labor is being stolen or whatever, just for finding the new terms under which they receive payment in exchange for their labor to be satisfactory? the decision is wholly up to these employees to make personally, on an individual basis. anything else is "telling people how to work".
I agree that Twitter was bloated with benefits, but this was the industry's rewarding of their labor aristocrats. It's unfair against anyone who couldn't make it there (like me too) but this is how the industry retained talent so far.
Now these benefits are being taken away. This may be fair to everyone else in the industry, and this is something big tech was already looking to cut during this economic turmoil.
Now this is the real point of contention with Elon Musk. Anyone who's left after morale exhausting job cuts is going to be worked to the bone. They have been enjoying benefits that they don't have anymore, but the wider industry also does not work people this hard.
Is it fair that the best companies should work their people this hard? At the very least this may return results quickly in the short-term to pay off the debt from buying Twitter, but how sustainable is this? Amazon Warehouses are the best in delivering packages quick, but they churn through workers through harsh conditions and they are running out of a labor pool to recruit from. Would Twitter be able to retain talent in the long run? Should the entire industry be run like this?
This then gets to the broader question of the recent societal trend you have been seeing. It's really a collective response to the question of whether society is taking care of the people working for keep it going. The answer for a lot of people is that society has been taking more and more from them. Their wages largely haven't been keeping up with increases in productively. Newer generations are being less economically involved than older ones. A foreign adverse nation does not have to be involved when the nation is already rotting from the inside and people can smell it.