Twitter just announced to employees via email is closing offices until next Mon

It seems like a striking lack of empathy, based on my experience with - certainly not the same situation, much more gradual - but a company in decline where people are deciding whether to jump ship.

When a place is screwed up and mismanaged, anybody intelligent prepares as best they can. And you don't put any stock in what leadership says because they're running the place into the ground in the first place! This always results in repeatedly broken promises, even if not as dramatic as with Twitter.

Most importantly, you don't allow any emotion towards the company or upper management to come into play if you know what's good for you. Your responsibility is to yourself, your family, your friends, and any other individuals you may care about. Nothing is more important than a rational assessment of your options.

The whole cult of personality (believing or rejecting) is just irrelevant in a real situation, in my universe.

I won't guess at how many people will in fact take the deal, but I think psychologically he greased the skids by making it "opt out", while also making it very rational to leave now.

Several comments I've seen say they would not quit yet, as it makes sense to draw things out while finding another job.

I think that ignores that obviously you can't count on anything, so choosing to end the chaos asap seems attractive. And if you quit now, there might be safety in numbers. Better to be part of a mass layoff that you don't need to explain why you left.

I guess the key point I want to make is that people may be underestimating the value of ending one's association right now, because smart, rational people tend to dislike open ended uncertainty and know what they don't know.

I see some people in denial that he's feeding Twitter into a woodchipper, and other people willfully ignoring all his past activities where he did not destroy companies.

Occam's razor says he is trying to liquidate it, because that's what he is doing. The objection to that, I think, is really just "why would he incinerate billions of dollars". Sometimes, though, you have to accept what you are seeing, no matter how crazy, and figure out what it implies.

It was thought that the Van Allen radiation belts should be lethal to humans, and the ultimate test was for astronauts to pass through them and survive. But eventually, doubters of the Moon landings reasoned that since the belts are lethal, the landings must be fake. You sort of have to prioritize your beliefs, otherwise you come to wildly different conclusions.

A more reasonable, emotionally mature individual would've taken time to develop the appropriate metrics to determine which employees were necessary, and which weren't, vs starting with the galacticly stupid approach of keeping the programmers which have written the most code in the past N days, and then following that up by giving generally well-off, easily re-employable, capable engineers an ultimatum, with a three month severance chaser. Who do you suppose is most likely to click that "yes" button? People who are not as easily re-employable.

I wouldn't be surprised if twitter has less than 10% of their best engineers left, with the remaining engineers being the lowest performers. And now those 10%'s lives are all the more difficult, meaning the majority will likely be showing themselves the door in the near future.

Pure, unmitigated, incompetence on Elon's part.

Lots of moving parts to make that work. And it often takes a special person who’s been there long enough to know a peculiar infrastructure needed in part to make that happen.

You always hear about how these jobs pay a lot, well it’s not always the kinda sexy academic stuff you hear about on HN… A lot of spinning up and deploying services.

Except it isn't? Content filtering and ranking based on properties such as individual preferences and localized content is way harder than dumping a SELECT * FROM tweets, not to mention compliance requirements.

I can't imagine a better way to legally fuck up a company as an engineer than to just stop keeping the lights on (and get paid over the holidays to do it!)