Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
Whatever you think of Musk or his goals, it's just not something that makes any sense for him to be spending his time on.
Literal space rockets. You couldn't tear me away from Starbase Texas.
Musk's actions are so bizarre and inefficient. He could have used perf review...
You can blame pointy haired PMs, activist community managers, leetcode and Foosball engineers, or whoever you want for the situation.
To Musk its all the same, over 50% of the workforce was actively hostile to Musk for being Musk, and at least 25% was actively engaged in sacrificing the business to pursue personal or political agendas.
This would be fine if Twitter were a cash cow posting record profits, but it wasn't.
The strategy Musk is performing is to create as much chaos as possible to shake out as many of those groups as possible, and hire back anyone caught in the crossfire.
I've never seen a CEO attempt this at this scale, but at my last company there was an employee like above in a top position - and in order to get rid of the people under his influence the only solution was to can the whole division.
All of these pretty clearly indicate that no one was minding the store.
But I challenge you to a much easier task. Link to the government lawsuit that you claim has been issued to twitter for being an ISIS recruiting and messaging platform.
Who would agree to be hired back without extracting serious risk premiums from Twitter? If I had taken the 3 month severance and am seeing the ongoing chaos, the only way I’d agree to go back is as a contractor for $2000/hr with a $1M retainer with no clawback.
The risk of losing your job however, carries a greater premium today than it did six months ago.
I don't know if 100k retention grants are good enough, but they're going to be good enough for some people.
A lump sum of US$ 100k as a retainer doesn't sound like a great deal after you've been through all these shenanigans. Some more desperate workers might take it just to get anything but those won't be the most motivated workers you'll get. The good ones will find better pastures, or just go back to extract more money out while looking for something better because they know there's no mutual trust anymore.
I feel like a lot of people trying to defend Musk's actions are treating people like they were logical machines. That their psychological safety doesn't matter if they're paid enough, they'll just accept the payment and work as usual, that's not how humans work...
In all honesty, this is just absurd, and is playing out like some bad movie plot. Next I expect Musk to fire more engineers without any severance at all, and force them to exit the building wearing one of those #GetWoke T-shirts he unearthed in a Twitter closet. He’ll then tweet out the video of the fired engineers exiting, and mock them with a Tweet like “Out with the old! Maybe you should go work at Grindr! LOL!”
Musk is not creating chaos on purpose [eye roll] - he does not know how to be a manager in a situation that is not a crisis dialed to 11 at ALL times.
Everything has to be a hair-on-fire-level crisis, to stress the minions and get them moving, except we see how that strategy is burning him out.
He's always been like that, we just never called it because "you can't argue with success", but you can definitely argue with failure.
This looks so unprofessional, erratic and unnecessary even if you want to cut down headcount and have a political motivation behind the take over, that it shocks me, honestly.
I guess that when someone is that wealthy you can duck-tape mistakes with money and move on.
I've complained many times about the effects of the so called "woke" ideology has, particularly outside of the US, but I don't think this is the way to do it.
If EM thinks this is a way of helping free speech and turn the volume down on some deranged ideologies, I don't think this is moving towards that goal.
Similar story for pay pal.
The only reason this is even slightly controversial is because people hate Musk too much.
But of course, Elon thinks it's all him. He's a genius, a savior and nothing can come between his view of reality. Imo, Elon is past his expiry date. Time for capitalism to fix him
Those two together means that the engineers who are similarly early, want to come work for you. In a world with no electric car market, if that's what you really want to work on, Tesla is a beacon to you.
It's served him well in several industries now, but I really don't see how that can apply to this new mission of trying to make something of a relevant-but-kinda-failing social network.
https://twitter.com/rob_sheridan/status/1595319316249186304?...
For example, I definitely always got the sense that pg had a negative assessment of him from some of pg's writings about PayPal's early days.
But I'll say I always admired Musk for his sheer tenacity and ability to work extremely hard (and his ability to convince other people to work extremely hard). I'd say my opinion about him started to change right when he started bizarrely libeling that guy in Thailand as "pedo-guy".
So I guess my question is whether he's always been a collosal asshole, or whether that just grew over time as his wealth and power removed any constraints on his ego.
He has to be good at something, maybe at taking bets and convincing people to give him money, like other HNr suggests. Who knows.
This line of thought always comes across as "ego defending rationalization" to me. That is, we don't like to believe that someone who is such an ass clown can be so successful, so we just chalk it up to his family's wealth or luck or something.
But it's clear to me from Musk's communications that:
1. He is extremely intelligent, at least in his ability to understand topics across a wide range of areas (business, technical, finance).
2. He is extremely driven. He could have easily put his feet up after PayPal but he chose to get involved in immensely difficult, grand projects.
3. He works extremely hard (at least when he isn't tweet trolling). I don't think anyone questions his long work hours and sleeping at the office during the Model 3 production ramp up.
4. At least until recently, he was able to get other extremely smart and driven people to follow his lead.
I guess it's really number 4 that seems like the biggest change in the past couple years in my opinion. I mean, I've got to believe a lot of smart people at Tesla and SpaceX are looking on thinking "WTF is Musk on??"
Combine this with a lot of money and you end up with someone with both the inclination and ability to take risky major actions quickly, as well as the resources necessary to walk away from bad bets intact. Over time I think this would reward and encourage the growth of impulsive tendencies in a person. But what happens if that person takes a wild swing that fails in a way they can't get away from or buy their way out of? (Not to mention the compounding effect of any drugs they might be on.)
There is also the Nobel disease.
The key is #4, I think he managed to have incredible challenges at his other companies that brought it people who knows not only how to perform the job very well but to manage him very well.
*I still have doubts about how much of his smarts is being smart or just sounding smart, he is certainly not dumb by any stretch.
Perhaps in the past? But he seems favourably inclined these days.
Don't get me wrong, lots of people are spouting off against Musk for various unrelated reasons, but pg is not a neutral character in this fight.
A lot of people "work hard" but they do not work smart. Musk in an extreme version of this. Unless he is not working himself and everyone else into the ground, he is not content. Everything has to be a crisis, and if there isn't one, create it.
Same as we were taught in school; keep the numbers you work with day to day by using a simple noticing.
Add 1 to 3.654 x 10^11, another billionaire appears!
Their wealth is mathematical inference. None of them have Scrooge McDuck Vaults full of real money.
Tangentially, Paul G Tweeted a few weeks ago about America being “fake”; American cheese was one thing he called out specifically. No one Tweeted back “billionaire wealth.” I had del’d my Twitter years ago, did not seem worth making a new one.
I keep seeing people repeat this. Where is this factoid coming from? I'm left to assume it's subtle racism stemming from a photo Elon took with some Asian (many likely Asian-American?!?) guys at the office.
However, people are claiming that no engineer in their right mind would stay there if not in that situation. It turns out Twitter has had less than 700 H1-B approvals since 2009:
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/Noahpinion/status/159464174641...
Basic arithmetic to determine there are at least hundreds of American engineers working at Twitter right now.
People. I get it. You don't like Elon. You find this type of work environment toxic. Not everyone is like you though!
In fact, at least a few of us are applying to work there as we speak.
"Why did you sacrifice other things in your life to work at a large tech company, operating at scale, for a high salary?"
Edit: Absolutely laughable that you think this will be detrimental to people's careers. Your other comments on this topic are frankly unhinged. If you are indeed a hiring manager planning on factoring this in to your criteria, please know this will be a massive red flag to productive engineers.
Musk absolutely smashed that culture at Twitter. It will be rough seas for a while but the company will emerge stronger. Maybe even profitable!
Discussed further in https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-h-1b-visa-has-problems...
And I would be looking as hard as I could.
The way H1-B employees are treated is ignominious. It breaks my heart to think of the situation these poor people are in - and make no mistake: In their hearts they want to treat _you_ that way, too. Speak out about it while you can, because you're next.
While most of us in this forum probably appreciate drive, technical mastery, and the creation of great things, etc., the reports on Musk's management style don't make for a compelling recruitment pitch.
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-...
So, to your question, probably not.
And as others mentioned, the recent batch of firing "for cause" did not come with the same generous severance.
Something I've learned (and keep learning in other contexts) is that change can be overwhelming for some for many reasons, probably more than I'm aware of.
I've literally gone to a previous coworker and said, "there's a job with your name on it. Your pay will literally double. Your hours will halve. And you won't ever have to fear a C-level throwing a tantrum." They hummed and hawed and explained away why they didn't want to try.
I think some of it is:
- inertia
- anxiety of "what if?"
- known over unknown
- ???
I get it. For the same reason that Geohot gets it.
There's a certain type of personality that doesn't care about life. They don't care about family. They don't care about wealth and material possessions. They don't care about "work life balance". They care about clout. They care about being "the best of the best". They want to be part of an elite team working on the hardest problems in the world, and nothing else matters. And Elon (through SpaceX, Tesla, and now Twitter) feeds that need greater than anything else available.
All he has to do is throw down a gauntlet and it'll attract people who like running gauntlets. This particular gauntlet is software engineering. Make a thing seem really hard and prestigious (even if it's artificially hard) and you'll attract the hyper-competitive people.
It's hard to find other jobs right now with all the companies laying off people.
Now, in retrospect, I would not have stayed but 9 months ago it was hard to know how chaotic Musk will be.
If I was in SF, I’d definitely apply.
If you're an ambitious Level 2 Hierarch and you know your Level 3 and 4 Hierarchs along with many of your fellow Level 2s have just departed, you can roll the dice and maybe become a Level 4 Hierarch before you depart in 6 months time. Experience allowing you to become a Level 4 Hierarch at a company that isn't collapsing.
Of course, it isn't clear that Musk is looking to promote any Hierarchs, so this would be a gamble.
I will admit that this entire saga shows rather reactive, if not plain erratic, behavior. That said, this behavior supposedly is not new in a sense that Musk has been known to sometimes sleep at Tesla factory and is a known workaholic that demands similar level of devotion.
I am saying all this as someone, who defended Musk's initial layoffs, because I assumed ( clearly wrongly ) that he had some sort of plan devised during his review of Twitter during purchase. Musk is currently worth 180b. Even if he burns Twitter to the ground, he could still buy 2 or 3 publicly listed companies on a whim ( as he seems prone to do ).
Is it the kind of power we, as a society, want one person to wield?
It really is terrifying. You know for a fact that he has a UI where he can pull up the DMs of anyone ever on Twitter. The blackmail opportunities alone were worth the $44b.
This is a pretty well known pattern to grow on social media though. Find the major division, double down on one side, and repeat your position. It's smart, but feels wrong to me. Needless to say, our attention talking about this is just making him more money, so I respect him to be in that position.
Employment is never certain. Companies grow, pivot, shutdown, cut costs. The last 10+ years were the golden years for tech, but times are changing. Fat needs to be trimmed. Sometimes it hits even the good ones. The business doesnt owe its employees anything other than compensation for services.
I empathize with the visa holders stuck in jobs or lost theirs and now have to scramble to look for a new job and sponsor. I was a H1B myself, and I was always aware of the risks and being at the mercy of my employer, but that is the risk I was willing to take for a job I liked that paid a lot more.
I see a lot of anger towards companies aggressively hiring at fault, but if they didn't, a lot more people would not have had their cush jobs for however long it lasted.
One saga I remember is the plaid-stripe scandal where Plaid founder accused Jay of stealing ideas (e.g. interviewed at plaid, having meetings)
This Orosz guy piled on with an anecdote and stated that this was normal for PM in fintech, especially at Stripe.
Then, Jay responded that:
- the job interview was before Jay joined Stripe and 3 years before Jay built this product at Stripe - All the meetings they had were initiated by Plaid. Jay even mentioned he was repeatedly asked for a meeting by Plaid.
Plaid founder never responded to this.
This Orosz guy kinda moved on and never apologized for piling on with an unrelated story.
[1] https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1595818243620380672
I assume, this is a rather cynical way to cut additional costs.
He's hiding something.
Of course, the one caveat to all this is our indentured servitude system of H1B visas. Even then, though, if I were on an H1B, as soon as it became apparent that Musk was taking over I would have started looking for other employment if I wanted to stay in the US.
But otherwise, I don't see why any other software engineers at Twitter would have any right to complain about cruel treatment. Just leave if you don't want to work there.
1. be laying off a shitload of people - he flat out said so pretty early on.
2. that he would drive those that remained extremely hard. Anyone who works at Tesla or SpaceX can verify that.
3. this is kind of a follow on from the first 2, but once it became clear about the financing behind the Twitter LBO, that Musk would be under a ton of pressure to reduce expenses and grow revenue just to pay off the additional billion dollars in annual interest.
Yes, the clown-show chaos is pretty extreme, even by Musk's standards. But a have no sympathy for anyone that still remains that doesn't have visa issues to worry about. And, indeed, I'd assume the only people who still are remaining are there by choice given all the great opportunities they've had to leave (3 months severance for quitting is a great deal).