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There's also no clarity on what the upside is "stock like spacex and tesla"... rockets are Long on investing and the future. Twitter isn't even close to on that time horizon. If I was asked to stay to build 2.0 I'd want to know what the plan was and how my equity compensation was going to work in real terms. Especially since months prior I would get equity and could sell it in immediate compensation and now I'm back to an early stage startup.

Even more materially, many of those employees are likely spending over their base on their lifestyle and investments. So say they were making $300k all told and they're now down to $150k base, If they were spending even near the base they've just massively changed their income trajectory even to the point of obvious insolvency. Eg "I can't afford this house anymore". I've talked to some people that are smart on investing and I've talked to others who say they're spending 67% post tax on their "lifestyle" of total comp which is insane to me. Stock moves any which way and you are eating into savings which likely also just dropped.

Anyone in that situation would be out like the rats.

The "down to base" would be a significant shock based on what levels.fyi has for them - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-e...

Taking an $80k/year pay cut for a SWEII ($70k stock, $10k bonus - I'm assuming no bonuses for a while) is, well, that's a lot.

With no future stock or the ability to sell it... and there are certainly other places that pay at least as much as Twitter's base alone, there are options out there.

They still have their equity grants that will vest each quarter as they would before. The difference is they are vesting a cash value equal to the price-per-share of when it was bought.

If you happen to be hitting your cliff soon, that is the only case you might be going down to base only.

Okay I can't unpack that.

I think that you are saying that if you had future vests that will turn into shares at the aquisition price ($53/share or somthing). But only your remaining outstanding vests exist.

I have no idea how far out twitter gave shares. Amazon does them to 3 years. So everyone who remains at twitter has some amount of time till they run out of all veests, depending on comp the latter vests may be big or small.

They all still go to base only and my point still stands tho they'd have till near when my final vests were coming up to tell me WTF my comp looked like.

Engineers interested in cars or rockets have way fewer exciting options than web devs working at Twitter.

Very much this.

Anecdote time: I have an acquaintance who’s an engineer who works on nuclear power plant technology. They’ve wanted out of their current employer for over a decade now.

Why have they stuck around? Because their current employer is the only one in a several thousand kilometer radius with any use for their expertise, one of only a couple they could work for without leaving the country, and one of only a handful whose primary language of business is one that they speak.

Tesla, SpaceX, and perhaps even the Boring Company have much more in common with that situation than they do with Twitter.

Exactly. I don’t think people realize that a below average software engineer or product manager at Twitter has way better career prospects than a top rocket scientist at SpaceX.

Eh, I'd be willing to wager that a skilled and experienced physicist at SpaceX could probably leave whenever they wanted and go to any other space rocketry company owned and run by an insecure, egotistical, self-centred, human-exploiting, planet-destroying billionaire.

Sadly, Blue Origin is also a dystopian meat grinder... who don't seem to be all that good at launching rockets either.

While true, engineers ae SpaceX are much much harder to replace that web devs/engineers at Twitter, which are a dime a dozen. With so many in the Valley cutting jobs, if Twitter needs to hire new engineers, I don't think they'll have issues finding them.

And by "a dime" I mean "a significant total comp package"

... that is going to lack meaningful stock and bonuses... or work life balance for a while.

For me it's not so certain; I think that most of the devs/engineers at Meta, Twitter, et. al., might get a bit of cold feet with the biggest tech companies and with Silicon Valley in general.

I think smaller companies and upstarts have a chance to get some great talent that will be strongly considering their living situation and looking for something more stable, but I'm not so sure that Twitter is going to have its pick of the litter for a long time until it demonstrates a stable and mature environment to work in.

I have no doubts some persons will be very nervous and take the opportunity, and I wish them luck. I'm not so sure others will be as eager.

Upstarts that I know of are struggling with funding, so I don't think that opportunity is as big as it once was.

Sure, Twitter can probably find new engineers to hire.

But replacing all of the random but critical bits of knowledge in the heads of the people walking out the door is much harder.

If this were true, they'd be earning more.

The difference is working for a startup with the potential to make some good money vs working just for salary.

Those options are culling their workforce right now.

An other component is that if you're working on rockets or EVs you might consider that rewarding in and of itself, and accept lower comp or worse conditions.

Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac.

And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is way smaller. That means less competitors, but also less places to work at.

Software?

My kids are out of college and working. I'd totally consider going to space-x as a fun-tirement if I had that option, work hard do cool shit, have low downside if I burn out or quit. But twitter, that just isn't as fun as space and explodey bits. Games and Space... that's where I'd take the cool part as compensation.

"halve your effective comp"

And also work double time for the indefinite future. So effective comp is quartered, by my accounting.

I was thinking of double time (hence talking about effective comp), I didn't see mentions of salary being cut but mayhaps I just missed it?

Stock, "$400" lunches, remote option, etc. Everything that's not a paycheck seems slashed.

Good point, that's definitely a part of comp'.

I think the salary hasn’t been cut, but the value of the stock (options) are probably very different now

As I understand it, nobody holds stock anymore, because he took the company private. He bought everybody's shares. So whatever portion of employee's comp was equity, that's now zero. Elsewhere, I saw somebody estimate that to be around half of twitter employees' comp -- I have zero confidence in that estimate, but it doesn't sound unreasonable.

And while they might get a lump sum for whatever equity they held, that's money in the bank and no longer a carrot.

Existing equity was converted to cash at $54.20/share, but will still be paid out on the existing vesting schedule. It's a carrot, insofar as it is promised future money, but it's a decaying carrot.

Edit:

Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.

I would guess, though I don't know for sure, that having your hero buy your company and then fire a bunch of your friends and valued colleagues seemingly arbitrarily, including entire teams that exist for actual reasons, probably would dampen your opinion of him somewhat.

Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work, I would have soured on him pretty fast.

> if [Steve Jobs] came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work

Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO?

"Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products."

"His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees"

"Jobs managed to force the resignation of most of Apple’s board members"

https://www.macworld.com/article/219225/steve-jobss-seven-ke...

He did do the firing whole teams bit, but not the fucking up the product bit.

I assume, for example that Apple didn't need as many finance people after the cuts, but he didn't manage to make the whole department quit in disgust.

Twitter still seems to work as well as ever, so it's too early to claim Musk fucked up the product. And far too early to claim he won't introduce a better product.

> He did do the firing whole teams bit, but not the fucking up the product bit.

He kinda did in that he slashed entire product lines, but Apple was not a single-product company.

Apple was also going very very badly, Amelio had already done a lot of cutting (reduced headcount by a third), and the company was still sinking (because it had nothing to float).

Apparently that was a total of 31% of the workforce: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

That's a big difference with what looks to be 75-85% of Twitter's pre-acquisition workforce in total.

The people who worked on SpaceX and Tesla were probably incredibly ideologically aligned with Elon genuinely believing they were changing the world for the better. Its really easy to pitch someone to work long hours when you are making one of the worlds first mass market electric car and honest to god rocket ships.

Meanwhile we are a years into total disenfranchisement with entire concept of social media. The sell just isn't there like his earlier ventures.

He’s also done nothing to communicate a vision beyond “work for an abusive psychopath.”

An addicted twitter toll with 100m followers starts talking shit about the place you work, purchases a lot of shares, decides to join the board, decides to not join the board, talks more shit, decides to just buy the company, changes his mind and backs out of the deal, talks more shit, changes his mind and buys the company, introduces new features without much thought, releases new features without much thought, turns off new features almost immediately, fires half the staff, complains about advertisers, complains about needing advertising dollars, has an idea to introduce payments and banking, continues to talk shit about his own company, fires people for speaking up, threatens everyone with an ultimatum, and then...

Edit: I don't use twitter but this is what I've been able to parse from HN articles being posted.

It is representative of how he is shown on HN.

Judging by other things discussed on HN that I do understand well, it is likely highly inaccurate picture.

It reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy: “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge” and especially The Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/#The_Gell-Mann_amnesia...

Hundreds (thousands?) of engineers opting for the severance package despite all the gloomy news about layoffs suggests this negative picture is fairly accurate.

This was just a description of independently observable facts. It even matches the timeline of the events. If anything, it may be missing a few items - it didn't even mention the court case at all.

I have several ex-SpaceX coworkers. All have said, basically, "I want off this rock, Elon has the money to make it affordable, but the biggest threat to that happening is Elon and his ideology. If he doesn't become the first murder in space, I'd be surprised".

Not just that. Elon forgot the basic rule of modern management "Treat your workers with respect". Moreover, Engineers are knowledge workers and need to treated with respect.

What's most amusing to me is Elon takes the advice from Youtubers & Influenceers but won't listen to his own engineers.

> None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him.

I do wonder has his idea of how people think about him been skewed by a decade or so of really only working with people who are really into him. Like, this mostly felt absolutely inevitable to me (though I'm surprised how far he pushed it so quickly), but then I never thought much of him.

> I assume a lot of the engineers have the “millennial” mentality of “I work not live, I don’t live to work”.

Not sure what's _particularly_ millennial about that. Hours worked in the US per year now is pretty similar to the period from 1970 to 1990, when there were no millennials working. There was a spike peak between 1990 and the early noughties, but not a huge one; to find big increases you're going back before 1970.

I disagree. I think he exactly calculated the kind of people at twitter, which is why he's trying so hard to get as many of them as possible to quit. He wants to make money off this purchase and to do that he needs to dramatically increase employee productivity, reduce headcounts to bare minimums to keep the current system running and then innovate something more on top of it to really make money. Work life balance people have no place in that kind of plan.

That does sound like a plan that could work (other comments have hinted at why it may not on this case).

But firing everyone immediately, with no chance to transfer knowledge? Funny!

In a situation you have to make choices as to what is important and, I don't think transferring knowledge is as important as everyone thinks in this case. The users don't directly make twitter money so there's no direct losses from downtime, plus advertisers are being scared away so the indirect losses from downtime from not being able to show ads is also minimized at the moment. The biggest cost is tipping the exodus numbers so far that what is left of twitter loses it's network effects to attract new users onces the next version is launched and the exodus is really far from that level right now. So, what's the expected value of a 12-48 hour outage on the small chance that something totally breaks and it takes your team of really smart people that long to figure it out without the knowledge transfer? I would say it's pretty small. On the other hand what is the benefit of using a decent chunk of the remaining six billion in cash in the company to pay off and push out all the people that will work life balance the plan into not working (and the smaller subset of wokes that will actively sabotage it)? I would say pretty high, given what the plan apparently is. There is also a time value to getting this done because the faster they do it the faster it can fade from collective consciousness and the faster things die down enough for Elon to step back from the CEO role, put a kinder, gentler but competent face in that role, rebuild advertiser relationships and make this thing print money.

I know if I was in his position I would be trying to fire more people than I actually think I need to right now just to make sure I don't have to prolong the bad press with later layoffs and to ensure there are roles to fill in three to six months when I get a full handle on the business and know what I actually need. This would accomplish both generating good press and ensure I can fill positions with people aligned with my vision and work ethic.

Kinda weird. He spent half a year convincing his followers that everybody at twitter was a lazy liberal who would rather woke than code. From his perspective, now he's "right". Congrats on the win!

> The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low.

I think this is largely why he fired everyone. He wants all his employees to be musk sycophants so he pushed everyone else out.

I wonder how many Musk fanboys at Twitter got the axe in the first round of arbitrary, poorly-conceived layoffs.

I wonder how many of them are still fanboys.

There’s a flip side to this: the act of surviving all this culling and thriving afterwards is going to be one heck of a resume addition.

The big challenges create big opportunities.

Maybe? Some employers might value the trait of “will go down with the ship” but I’m not sure the ones you want to work for would…

To what future employer? The culling seems almost entirely arbitrary. Are future employers going to see someone with exceptional talent, or a high tolerance for further abuse?

I think the crux of the situation is that Tesla and Twitter are completely different companies. And Elon seems to be going for Twitter based on his learnings at Tesla. Manufacturing a car at scale that requires well defined components, supply chain management and production is so very different from Twitter which is a global platform where anyone can add anything.

Elon's internal memos read as if Twitter engineers were below his standards. I don't doubt that there are some truths in it, but there are also many great engineers who want to build great stuff, who make progress despite the infighting culture of Twitter, and who have built pretty scalable and autonomous systems in the past years. They may feel dignified by Elon's policies and memos, for good or for bad, and then chose to leave - a net loss for Twitter.

And what's so hardcore about Payroll system? Shouldn't we demand quality instead and I'm not sure if working 80 hours a week would lead to better quality of the system.

What most of us want out of a payroll system is accuracy. I would be deeply alarmed if I found out the payroll department at my employer was putting in 80 hour weeks to get the checks out.

On the contrary, I think Elon knows the type of person at Twitter and is getting rid of them as fast as possible, the only bad side being that he doesn't (maybe) realize the harm that will do when the knowledge of the systems walks out the door.

He hasn't had time to know them. He doesn't even know who does what and who's already been fired. It's only been a few weeks. He's only now wanting to "understand the tech stack"!

He might think he knows the employees, based on his prejudices and clichés. Nothing more.