Elon Musk tells Twitter staff to work long hours or leave | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk tells Twitter staff to work long hours or leave

bbc.com

103 pointse2e4117 comments

Serious question... why would anyone actually stay?

If your hours are being doubled without your salary being doubled, and you'll get three months' severance if you leave...

Who in their right mind wouldn't take the severance and go find a job elsewhere with normal hours for the same pay?

Nobody's curing cancer or inventing AI here. There's no grand noble mission to convince you to stay. It's just Twitter.

Basically everyone who stays is getting their hourly rate cut in half or something like that. And these are all qualified professionals who can find other jobs.

Why would anyone stay?

> Why would anyone stay?

It surfaces both the desperate and the spies.

If a job is meaningful you can get people to stay because they believe in it. I've done it for two projects. That said, twitter isn't that. I imagine he just want to get rid of as many people as he can.

> why would anyone actually stay?

People who are on a work visa would likely be hesitant to not click 'yes' at this point. Given all of the recent layoffs there are probably also some people who are afraid of being able to find another job and have medical/family/debt issues.

But yeah, if you're confident you could find another gig and have money saved up, the 3 months severance to escape that mess would probably look really good right now.

If I were on a work visa I would click "yes", then start looking for another job (if I weren't already looking). No need to start the clock on your visa expiring if you don't have to.

In any other situation, I'd take the 3 months pay and move on with my life.

The good ones will leave, the ones who fear they can't find anything else will stay.

Seriously, even if you're a true believer in Elon Musk's vision for humanity or whatever, the working conditions just sound miserable. Twitter will almost certainly lose a ton of their best workers now, and more in the coming months.

Yeah, I get why a younger version of me would click Yes working at spaceX and maybe even Tesla, but Twitter???

We should stop calling it working hard and call it wage theft instead

I can’t remember which investment bank suffered a revolt of their junior workers, but their line was, hard work will pay off, meaning the hardest workers get well paid jobs.

But these companies steal wages from the workers who put in hard work and overtime, but don’t get the job, or quit, or get sick.

These firms don’t discard the work done, it’s all used. And then they’ll be called quitters or unprofessional.

I was just reading about the musician behind much of Doom’s music got treated like that

Serious answer to your serious question. Improving Twitter would improve the world. If the people working there are as serious and dedicated as SpaceX employees, they are much more likely to succeed. Serious engineers and designers must be more excited than ever that playtime is over.

Destroying Twitter would also improve the world, if you think that's going to happen. So either way it's a win. Whether it blows up like SpaceX's first few rockets or lands when it really matters.

Edit. And here's GeoHotz as the first canary supporting this point about serious engineers being attracted to this version of Twitter. https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz/status/159295542717976576...

Are you speaking as a Twitter employee?

But it's not like improving twitter would improve the world like nuclear fusion, better batteries or a cure for cancer would - there are plenty of better investments. It's hard to even establish metrics for what "improvement" or even "success" looks like in the case of twitter. From Musk's standpoint "improvement"/"success" means he makes money (or at least doesn't lose a lot of money) on the deal. There are plenty of alternatives to twitter out there already and probably others being worked on. Twitter could disappear tomorrow and the world wouldn't be negatively impacted at all, in fact it would probably be a benefit.

>Improving Twitter would improve the world.

Man that's a massive bubble you life in, no one care's about twitter, especially not the "world"

Sure, but Twitter cares about you.

No why? I used it 10 years ago so my plant's could tell me when they need water...

I have Privacy Badger and all Anti-Social Block-list you can imagine ;)

I wish.

Get 10 journalists in a room and ask them what twitter experience is like. I know at least 1 that tells me they don't scroll twitter feed anymore, they only have lists they follow or tweet deck or something

Twitter has laid off, fired, and will likely continue to bleed out some of the finest minds working on highly resilient, performant, and distributed technologies. Product design was absolutely hollowed out by the first round of layoffs, and Musk has said that product design will take a backseat to engineering (albeit without engineers!), indicating that he thinks Twitter is a technical, not a product, problem (which neatly explains a number of the missteps of the past few weeks). In short, there are very few "serious engineers and designers" left inside Twitter, and it'll be a long and arduous process to find people with the appropriate skills and experience to replace them, especially now that it's clear that one's employment at Twitter is solely at the whim of a notably capricious owner.

Beyond that, demanding engineers engage in death-march efforts for a social media app is very, very different than doing it for electric cars or rockets, which are linear technical challenges with defined delivery endpoints; when does the death march for NuTwitter (or "X," or whatever) end? What's the vision? What's the goal? How does this improve the world, as opposed to protecting Musk's pledged Tesla shares? No answer to any of that.

Quite frankly, it's a testament to the work Twitter engineers have done to date that the platform hasn't already fallen over, though it's showing signs of creaking under stress. If Musk faces a mass exodus at the end of this week, then it may not survive the World Cup.

The word “serious” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this post…

Seriously.

> Why would anyone stay?

Because moving suddenly is difficult? Because if you can work remotely your job may be pretty cushy? Because there have been a bunch of layoffs in the sector and jobs aren't just materializing for everyone anymore? etc.

Hunting for a job generally sucks no matter how good you are.

> Because if you can work remotely your job may be pretty cushy?

But Musk has already issued an edict saying that everyone will be in the office for at least 40 hours / week.

> Because there have been a bunch of layoffs in the sector and jobs aren't just materializing for everyone anymore?

Sure, but if someone has a decent emergency fund saved up + the 3 months severance that should get them through long enough to find work on the other side.

And if you’re a professional and don’t have an emergency fund that is somewhere between six months to two years of expenses then downsize your life until you do.

Your emergency fund is fuck you money and the bulk of your leverage when getting out of a bad work situation.

But that only means people will start to look for another job while working for Twitter. As soon as they find something, they quit. That's even worse than quitting suddenly (because the ones who are looking for a job somewhere else won't have their minds on Twitter anymore).

Can’t work remotely at twitter.

Key staff is probably identified by now with high certainty and those can probably negotiate a substantially better deal than what would be possible at old Twitter--if they know their worth... which is not trivial either i imagine.

That theory doesn't hold. If Musk doesn't have respect for other people's life (and time), why do you think he would offer them more money to stay? In Musk's view, "hardcore mode" is the "normal mode", so no room for negotiation.

For shares in a company that might rocket to the moon?

How did they handle shares? I thought they just paid them out (or were going to) but it's not a public company anymore. I mean I guess you could still have shares internally if they wanted to go public again...

It's a private company now, I don't believe any Twitter employees are getting any equity.

I saw it mentioned somewhere that he's planning to offer some kind of share bonus similar to SpaceX.

Ignoring the fact that it's a private company now with no publicly traded shares, Twitter loses $4 million per day. Before the buyout, most of its revenue (> 90%) based on ads. But now advertisers are leaving the site en masse and there's no real plan to replace that lost revenue, let alone make the company profitable.

Also the leveraged buyout saddles twitter with debt. It coats $1B/yr to service (interest). I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I hear a train.

A couple theories:

* You're a Musk fan boy and want to be noticed by him

* Lots of people leaving creates a power vacuum and (in theory) a chance to get that next promotion with less competition

* You're close to retirement/ you find the process of assimilating into a new company to be more exhausting than just sticking it out where you're at.

Suddenly working double hours aka 2 jobs (or more) for the price of one when close to retirement? That sounds pretty awful. Maybe if retirement is 1 December... still why not just quit in that case?

The new Twitter basically IS a new company. So you're going to have a learn a new company culture and new colleagues either way.

You own shares of the company and you want them to be worth a lot? You like your job and work long hours already anyway? You’re excited for the new vision and want to help make it happen?

It’s funny how many people here equate voluntarily sitting at a desk in a climate controlled room doing what you love and being paid for it with being oppressed.

There was a great article on here about someone who worked long hours at stripe and missed the deep sense of purpose and fulfillment it gave them. Life isn’t all about punching the clock in a job you hate and whining.

> You own shares of the company and you want them to be worth a lot? You like your job and work long hours already anyway? You’re excited for the new vision and want to help make it happen?

But none of the Twitter employees own shares now, right?

> It’s funny how many people here equate voluntarily sitting at a desk in a climate controlled room doing what you love and being paid for it with being oppressed.

If a person is working extra hours as a company owner and expects to be paid back by the company becoming more valuable, that makes some sense. But if the owner says "you will work double hours with no extra compensation, or will be let go", then a) that's not voluntary; b) you got a 50% pay cut, which also was not voluntary and would make me love my work about 50% less.

Two founders working their asses off is one thing. Forcing thousands of non-owner employees to work their ass off with no additional compensation is just wrong. If he said "Hey, anyone in a position to work their ass off will be paid time and a half for any hours over 40 a week", that would be reasonable.

Twitter plans to give stock options to everyone just like Tesla does. That includes factory workers with hourly wages at Tesla. Many workers have earned more from their options than all their paychecks combined.

Where are you getting “double hours”? Is everyone exaggerating “long hours” into “double hours” in order to justify irrational outrage here?

You also keep saying this is mandatory. Yet this article is about how employees have been given the option to accept a generous severance package instead. Any mention of Elon and otherwise critical thinkers seem to cease all critical thinking.

Maybe working at Twitter has been a complete doss these past few years and people realise they'd have to work twice as hard regardless of whether they stay or move elsewhere?

Let's be honest, it isn't as if Twitter is introducing new functionality on a regular basis. I log in once every few months and cannot think of the last time I saw a new feature.

To those that work at Twitter. Please just leave. Don't try to stick around and make this work any longer. Don't reward Elon for this behavior.

Will you pay their salaries?

Note to admins: I accidentally clicked 'flag' on the parent post when I just meant to click the 'context' link beside it. I find nothing wrong with the comment, sorry about that.

So what I was going to say was: I don't need to, Elon will pay 3 months severance. Also they can click the dumb pledge button and stay on until they find another job, whatever. Or they can just not listen to me. I said please, it wasn't a command. I'm not their ward.

I just know that I've stuck it out with companies that start screwing with their employees expectations and benefits, and I really shouldn't have stuck around, I should have left the instant that started. I encourage those at Twitter to do the same. It will likely only get worse for the next few years before it gets better, if it ever does.

Note if you click the timestamp, the "flag" link should be swapped to "unflag" so you can undo flagging.

I guess I could have been a lot more clear myself. I have a lot of compassion for employees that have obligations and choose to stick around, even if they might not like the working conditions. People have financial obligations, and it is far from Clear that people can smoothly transition to an equivalently paying job given the unprecedented Tech layoffs going on right now.

If people have f you money, then they already are going to do whatever they want. Either way, these employees are adults and presumably capable of making their own decision. I don't think either of our pleas or caution are particularly relevant or new information to them

Will you endure the longer hours which will be implemented at your job also, for it will appear evident, that the tech worker is unperturbed by diminished working conditions?

Sure, I’m hiring.

Does any one know if there an Vision of what this guy wants twitter to be requires war footing like preparation? All I have heard is the paid verification (which was a disaster) and then something about payments. None of those need preparation on war scale or working long hours.

If leadership's idea is to throw things at the wall and see what sticks, just run in the opposite direction.

Also later if you are fired due to performance reasons are you given any severance time(especially if you are on a work visa)?

People who agree to Musk's terms and click the 'yes' link aren't going to be given a severance if he deems that they've not met the terms of his implied contract. Better to get out now and save yourself a lot of mental anguish and burnout.

And Elon is the guy tech people admire? C'mon, he's not a Davinci or Linus or Jobs or Gates. He's just a clown with money

Clicking the 'yes' link seems like you're agreeing to an implied contract. The contract being you're going to work as many hours as Musk wants or he's going to fire you anyway (without severance). May as well get it over with now and take the severance.

If I ever had doubts that all companies, including big tech ones, need unions to protect employees from management abuse, I no longer do.

Seems like post-purchase Twitter would be a great test lab for unionizing a big tech company. What else do (many of) the workers have to lose?

Yeah but if everyone works from home is hard to unionize. By the time they all go in it will only be true believers left

Nobody works from home at twitter.

Didn’t musk claim that only 10% show up so meals are 400$

Didn’t he end WFH a week ago

It's possible to get "high on work" and have a good time doing so – it can be very ego-confirming – but how long for? At some point, there has to be something else happening in your life.

Asking employees to either be on that "work high" permanently or pack their bags is inhuman and abusive.

Who would hang around at Twitter voluntarily? Gotta be out of their minds. I get that are people trapped with responsibilities or by visa/legal status but who would want to hang around?

The timing makes this look like a reaction to Musk firing Twitter engineers for criticizing him on social media[1]. It seems like a thinly veiled loyalty test instead of a marshaling the troops for the rough road ahead. The lowest performing engineers ostensibly got the axe in the first round of layoffs. Now Musk wants to root out those employees who aren’t willing to dedicate their lives to the bizarre theater[2] of Total Commitment.

Some folks seem content to give this behavior a pass citing Musk’s admission that he works 100 hours a week The self-satisfied joy that the gravy train is over for these “lazy tech socialists” is surreal. When you consider that Musk is literally the richest person on earth, it is physically impossible for Musk to work enough hours — over multiple lifetimes — to reconcile a $193B net worth with what any reasonable person would consider a fair compensation.

And to believe that he has a plan for Twitter 2.0 as a “digital town square”[3] strains credulity when he’s been a notorious shitposter. It’s almost as if he insists on sincere engagement from everyone but himself. The Twitter Blue fiasco makes it look like Musk is struggling with his first truly /complex/ challenge. As opposed to, you know, simply complicated shit like rockets and electric vehicles.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-fires-twitt... [2] https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/158770970548883046... [3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518677066325053441

Not to mention "working 100 hours a week" is very different when you're the boss and set what your output is expected to be. Working 100 hours a week at the top is very different: it's voluntary (meaning he knows he doesn't have to if he doesn't want to, which means he won't feel trapped doing it), a lot of those hours are probably things like meetings or reading emails or whatever (not suggesting it isn't important, but it isn't the same as doing more involved engineering work for 100 hours a week by any stretch), etc.

And that's assuming we even believe Musk actually genuinely works 100 hours a week. I am sure he is around his businesses and stuff for that time, but I wouldn't be surprised if he took long breaks between doing anything of real value regularly which massively dropped it

The rate of his trolling alone shows that he has plenty of free time during his "hardcore work hours".

Hah, that is indeed true

I am curious how he plans to enforce that on the European sites, most likely will need to fire everyone on this side of the pound.

He will likely close the offices outside the US where labour laws are strong. No need to keep a european office if you can make us workers do overtime and get people cheaper on other markets on similar timezones.

Of course this is short sighted AF but thats his MO for most things when it comes to employees.

Yep, with this attitude closing is his only option.

Quit, take severance , look for a job or don’t quit and look for a job. Guess it depends how fast you think you can get a new job.

That's so... "revolutionary".

I'd be extremely tempted to not agree to the pledge, and instead email HR, letting them know I'll be on the market in three months, and that I'll happily renegotiate my employment contract and comp at that time.

> In an email to staff, the owner of the social media firm said workers would be expected in the office for at least 40 hours a week, Bloomberg reported.

meh. He bought a company that isn't making any money that acts like its raking in billions every year, staffed with people who think of it as a lifestyle business.

According to the 2021 financials, they lost ~$200M but that was after an ~$800M settlement[1] which means they seem to have made ~$600M in 2021 - not a huge amount but definitely not "going down the pan quickly".

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-posts-loss-2021-stock-1301280...

Why does the $800M settlement not count against the business under your accounting method? It happened.

It does count, of course. But that's a one-off for 2021. If they kept the same financials for 2022 as they had in 2021, they'd have made ~$580m - a very different picture to the "TWITTER LOSES MONEY!!!!" meme.

Maybe you care about free speech and what Musk is attempting to accomplish? Maybe that's a possibility

And think he has a chance in hell of pulling it off, and have confidence he won’t randomly fire you for walking by him in the hall (at Tesla managers advise employees to not walk past his desk because of the risk of random firing)

//Tesla managers advise employees to not walk past his desk because of the risk of random firing

Really? He's that volatile? If that's true, he's like Aladeen from the Dictator. I would not care what the company's lofty purpose is. I wouldn't want to work for someone that unstable.

All that was needed to obtain Elon Musk's definition of free speech was to fire the content moderation team. I don't see how an engineer working 100hr weeks will "make Free Speech happen". The irony is that Musk is running Twitter into the ground - I guess if Twitter shuts down the people sharing Musk's vision will deem the battle over free speech won since no one will ever again flag their tweet! /s

I don't really see the issue. If it doesn't sound appealing to you, take your 3 months sev and leave.

It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

"Hmm, this page doesn't exist"

Sorry, fixed.

thought you were talking about twitter.com -- I was like ohh that was slightly faster than expected.

Both companies famous for their burn out culture. That the CEO would want all employees to work as much as possible without concern for burnout is completely unsurprising, but that does not make it a good way to run a tech company.

Those companies are clearly not in the same position as twitter either. I have no idea why "trust Elon" should just be taken as a given.

Not really. They are famous for advancing sustainable transport, re-usable rockets and Starlink.

Brain work efficiency peaks at about 25h/week. Musk should know this, but obviously doesn't. Why is this important? Because humans make mistakes. And the rate at which we make mistakes raises with exhaustion. Actually working 40h/week (you know, not 40h being at work, but actual focused work) is draining your batteries massively, and I won't go into the 50h/week or more, because this is technically suicide and only works for very short periods (a week, 2 weeks is already a stretch by a long shot). Also note that the time to recover from this takes even longer, assuming you are given the time to actually do that.

Sum this all up and Musk is doing a very stupid thing: He tells employees to be more inefficient and create more bugs and problems because they have to work long hours now for ... what exactly? If I were someone looking to do "black hat" things announcements like that are a golden sunrise in the morning, an opportunity in the waiting.

From a business perspective this is just many levels of stupid.

Maybe as an average, but high performers can sustain more than 40h/week and that's who he is targeting.

Why would high performers want to work for him at Twitter though? Twitter and the toxic person who owns it isn't really going to be appealing for high performers.

I have yet to meet a single person who can actually do that much sustained work for long periods of time without consequences. I remember talking to some guy who supposedly worked 80-90h/week and started dissecting what he truly did. Ended up with ~30h of actual work. That is good, but it was also showing him how much inflated ego and bullshit he was carrying around.

Let me add here that I have a lot of personal experience when it comes to long (actual) working hours and consequences from that. The moment you have to crosscheck all the things, run tests and whatnot, you are confronted in a more immediate way with all the mistakes. Most of these so called high performers fall apart when subjected to such a strict regime, because they are normal humans like everyone else. There are outliers, and these people have deficiencies in other areas because their brains work a bit different, so this doesn't come for free, either.

Edit: Here, a nice link for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_fatigue_on_safety

For example, where I live there is a group of stupid idiots called "doctors" (and I suppose this is not much different elsewhere on this planet), who think they can deal with long working hours. Imagine you end up in hospital with a doctor who had a long shift or is maybe on the 2nd shift already, because "it is no problem!" (problems can be fixed with pills). I have a little red book about high altitude sickness here, and doctors are high up in the list of professions to die from that. Pills cannot fix everything.

Got a source for the 25hr/week thing?

Also both are famous for not being underwater thanks to government subsidies.

That's a decade old right wing talking point that was silly back then and even sillier after they were paid back with interest.

The loan he cheated to get is the least of it. Think carbon credit, federal and state subsidizing EVs, etc.

And of course SpaceX, which wouldn't exists without government support.

Mind you, getting gov contracts isn't an easy feat – but it's a completely different than being successful in selling to corporate clients, like Twitter did.

I have a really hard time seeing the government extend the corporate welfare that Tesla and SpaceX receive to Twitter.

> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right

A non-zero number of people are dead due to issues with Tesla software.

... and probably twitter software!

>It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

What are your thoughts on him being pretty much the only one not being able to see that the feature he pushed would create massive problems with account impersonation?

What about him retweeting obvious misinformation?

Proudly mocking his new employees with factually wrong understanding of the product?

I know many people conflate wealth and power with talent, but come on, at some point it has to be impossible to not see that the emperor has no clothes.

> What are your thoughts on him being pretty much the only one not being able to see that the feature he pushed would create massive problems with account impersonation?

He moved too fast and everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to correct mistakes, which he did.

> What about him retweeting obvious misinformation?

It was dumb and he recognized that. He removed it within hours.

> Proudly mocking his new employees with factually wrong understanding of the product?

IMO it was wrong to bring it up publicly, but it wasn't factually wrong. It was information from the server team.

Tesla and SpaceX were companies that were going to revolutionize their branches. You would join believing in Musk's vision and hope to be part of something great.

Twitter exists already for quite a while, is not doing great and has a couple of competitors already. And Musk's vision? He didn't even want to go through with the takeover, and his first attempts to show his vision suggest he's rather clueless.

Yes - people problems are inherently more dynamic and complex than engineering problems.

You mean both of his companies that have HEAVILY regulated products and need to pass extensive testing and certification by third parties before being used? You mean those are safe? I wonder why. Must be Elons genius.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com