Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Complaining, requesting change, then leaving was how it went.
I still feel conflicted, "did I do the wrong thing, am I the weakling?"
I now better appreciate that asserting my boundaries is all that keeps me safe from that kind of unhealthy situation, for me.
So yes, there are lots of engineers at tech companies doing all sorts of different things, and thousands of engineer-years worth of energy are spent on projects that don't pay off. But that's not bloat, it's strategy. And particularly, in an era of cheap money, the risk-reward ratio was strongly on the side of "make more bets".
Fire them, twitter was bloated, but do it with respect and dignity. Some of us here in the comments seem to think the world needs to be a dark and cruel place and people are "spoiled" but it does not, being a dick is an option and Elon went head first in.
Twitter’s US HR department seems to have a hard time understanding that the USA is not the world, and that in several countries, people cannot be fired over email, nor can local employment regulations be ignored.
This seems like the ultimate test of those protections. I really hope it's not just fluffy words.
On the other hand, there is the "salt water theory" of how this is going to play out (and the article I think proves that too): If you turn up the heat, the good guys will leave first. I.e. the water will evaporate, leaving only a salty brine:
Elon Musk [...] set up meetings with key engineers in an attempt to persuade them to stay. Some employees were offered up to $100,000 in raises to stay[...]. Still, more than 1,000 employees quit that day, taking voluntary severance.You could also look at the millions of times these "protections" have been tested in court already. There is no magic escape hatch for Twitter or USA companies in general. If people are not fired properly, they are effectively still working at the (twitter EU) company. After a court sentence, the tax labor institution will straight seize the money from the companies bank accounts, with priority over any other debt collection. The only way not to pay out the workers is literal bankruptcy, and even for that case there are special funds in place.
Court sentences may take a long time, but after a short time (1 or 2 weeks) of not being allowed to work by your employer, you can just start at another job while waiting for a proper firing notice or the court sentence.
BTW an employer can absolutely fire someone at will in the EU, just not "on the spot". You have to either give a period or pay it out, and you cannot fire a large amount/fraction of employees together at will - you have to open a special process and then justify it, e.g. profit losses.
To take Germany as an example, since my sibling already mentioned it. You absolutely can do layoffs in Germany. There can be "complications" like a workers council (Betriebsrat), unions are a thing (read: https://www.heise.de/news/Twitter-Mitarbeiter-in-Deutschland...)
Now reading a bit about this online, I found https://www.howtogermany.com/pages/termination-employment-co... which says this about severance that might get paid instead of large legal battles:
This severance will often amount to 50% of the monthly salary per year of service
I'm not saying Musk is right in how he's doing this. I absolutely don't. But the oft hailed worker's rights seem not to do much more than what Musk was giving most people anyway. Depending on tenure they maybe even got a better severance, while a 10 year employee might be better off fighting and then settling for the above (or better).
But the severance offer must be laid out specifically for each worker, due to the above variation in days, plus whatever would be an extra bonus. The company can't legally say "I'll give everybody 30k" and let HR figure it out later. Or to be precise, a worker cannot accept that as official layoff notice and expect to have a legal claim on those 30k later.
I think the right thing would have been something like, "accept immediate layoff with normal legal payout, plus everybody gets 20k" for EU workers (that number being 30k - estimated payout). But of course Elon didn't wanna run this through HR nor acknowledge that Twitter EU must comply with EU laws.
What I'm very interested in is the difference in actual severance and worker's "morale" for lack of a better word. I.e. is it actually a better deal in the end?
Since car manufacturers were mentioned elsewhere in the threads. These usually "play ball" and even when they wind stuff down they try to get people to leave on their own first, like retiring early and such and even creating "transfer companies" that help people re-skill. E.g. here an Opel plant shutdown in 2014: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/werksschliessu...
But "betriebsbedingte Kündigungen" are a thing. Apparently 73% of people that loose their jobs in Germany have that happen to them: https://karrierebibel.de/betriebsbedingte-kundigung/ Basically if "the job is no longer available" then they can kick you out. If Musk wasn't an "I can do whatever I want", he could use that. Of course being Germany there are rules about that, like having to fire people based on social considerations and he doesn't care about that at all and he'd have to keep the kind of people he wants out if he played by the rules: the 46yo father of 3 that works the 8 hours of his contract vs. the 23yo kid right out of university that may just submit to Elon's macho ways.
I bet this is the easiest for him too. Yeah it's gonna cost money for the lawyers to sort this all out after the fact. Meanwhile the people he wants out are gonna be out.
I personally would have not "accepted" the severance package, out of fear of losing my rights due to "voluntary resigning".
The workers affected are also probably not like the typical Auto AG workers at all. They weren't working at twitter "for life", and can get a good job elsewhere fast.
So, it doesn't matter whether Elon cares at all about social considerations or not - because the courts do.
The EU is not a single jurisdiction. In Germany, the above statement is not true. You can't fire without cause (at least not after the probationary period).
There's been larger layoffs that have all respected the law, because judges do not fuck around with this. It's one thing to fire one employee and bet that he will not have the time or money to fight for two months of back pay. It's a whole other to fire more than 50 people (which in most of europe is the trigger for mass layoffs) and not have even the state have a look at it.
It could be the reverse. If you take at face value that twitter is trying to refocus on actual improvements to the product as opposed to whatever the thousands of engineers were doing before, then some people may be attracted to that work environment. In my experience the best engineers have left jobs because they're bored, not because of a lack of perks or money. A lot of people leave a lot of money, ridiculous benefits and a 20 hours work week by leaving FAANG so they can work on something meaningful, even if it is a CRUD app. At least they can point to something and say "I did that".
There's a lot to do at twitter that was not a priority in the last decade. Things that seem like bugs (e.g. mobile app looking at a tweet and it disappears or gets pushed away), to search being awful (can't search specific users or before/after or exclude or anything really, its just a black box that sometimes works), to opening up and consolidating the API with the developer API, to actually getting rid of bots.
These aren't necessarily hard problems. This is exactly what a startup would be doing and would definitely drive engagement. But for some reason Twitter has deprioritized these for ... other things? But now it looks like it might actually be an exciting place to work.
People terminated were offered 4 weeks’ severance if they signed a separation agreement. This severance feels insulting, given that people who did not opt into being part of “Twitter 2.0” just one week ago received three months' severance.
Nobody cared that he’s a MAGA loon who’s under investigation for retaliation against people who complain about racist working conditions.
Its the only reason I believe people stayed when they could have left 4 months ago into a lava hot hiring market.
I'm sure the Tesla engineers are happy at least, with this dumbass no longer over their shoulder all the time, they probably can work on making their cars not kill people and stop recognizing children as targets instead of putting funny honk tones in the car.
>We have to ask the question: why is Elon Musk creating what seems to be the most toxic working environment among major tech companies in 2022?
Because he is a completely incompetent clown projecting his insecurities to the world and pretending to be hardcore, and if he was written as a parody of a capitalist villain in a book, he would have been rejected by the editor because it's simply not credible enough that he's that stupid.
One of the best summaries of him I’ve read.
Musk:
- want to stop remote working and force you to commune for 2h per day
- want to bring "hardcore" work culture from Tesla/SpaceX
- is known from firing people randomly and micromanaging
- have no clear vision for company and is quickly loosing advertisers
- bring outsiders from tesla to take over and judge you based on LOC
There are multiple reports of whole teams infra teams leaving. The next thing to happen is a big hack or outage. I only visit Twitter to see things of fire :P
I'm fairly sure thats a parody. Nothing in that person's profile indicates that they work at twitter.
That's the authoritarian's pledge... "Need a Stong Man to fix it all for you, I'll do it." -What I personally gathered from watching authoritarians.
It's an abusive situation at Twitter. Pray Evil Elon face is kept hidden from the people whom he now bosses, and Good Fun Guy Elon remains on.
Yeah, no, this post is just a good bit of trolling, and seemingly quite a few people seem to fall face first into it.
But yes it will be interesting to see
Automated "we accept your resignation" termination letters are definitely not legal in Germany, and probably also not in many other European countries.
First of all you need to know that I'm a strong believer in worker rights and I am in no way on Elon's side ON ANYTHING he does.
But Gergely Orosz commentary and narrative around this is just starting to get to me. Where is why:
- He (Gergely Orosz) has personally been using this situation to inflate his influence and grow as some sort of thought leader for engineers.
- Most tech companies are BLOATED, I know because I've worked in multiple for the last fifteen years. Everyone that works there with any sense of business acumen will know as well.
- Most engineers work in cost centers and on wild company bets that will never pay off. Most engineers and teams at these companies have been funded by easy and cheap access to capital.
- We have been treated like greek gods and goddesses and we are spoiled.
Times are / have changed. Buckle up peeps, it's about to get rough. It's time to accept a lot of things are about to change. Now it's the time to be resilient and provide extreme value to you employer or just quit and build something on your own.
Elon cutting bloat and Elon treating people with cruelty are separate: Elon could cut bloat without being actively cruel. He’s choosing to be cruel for his own enjoyment.
And I think you are right. I don't stand for this guys shenanigans in anyway. He is a terrible leader.
I just meant that a lot of people are observing and waiting to see if he can run twitter in a lean but sustainable way. If he can... oh boy, we are up for a wild ride.
No matter how ruthless one chooses to be, there's no need to also be mean, unless one is sadistic and/or compensating for some major psychological problems.
Over the last decade, Twitter has averaged a 25% revenue growth rate per year, and if it sustained that level of growth it would soon be worth what Elon paid for it.
The problem is that Elon clearly has no idea how to put all of those talented people to work on something worthwhile and only sees them as dead weight. Maybe the old management didn’t know how to make the best use of all of the people they hired, but Elon has zero idea of how to use the people he fired.
Compare it to what Steve Jobs said when returning to Apple: not that the company was bloated and the employees were lazy, but that it was full of talented people who just need a vision they can get behind.
I'm sorry but I'm very skeptical of this. It's unclear to me if you mean revenue or MAU but I would doubt it's growing at 25%. That would be an insane curve of exponential growth which I'm fairly certain is not the case for Twitter.
Elon bought the company for $44 billion, so he too clearly agrees that the potential for growth is high.
> Elon bought the company for $44 billion
It's more complicated than that. He agreed to pay $44 billion at a certain moment in time where interest rates were negative. The way these acquisitions work is by borrowing a huge amount of money (something like 80% of the deal) putting up a much lower percentage of your own money (say 20%) and then using the business itself as collateral agains the loan.
The math changes a lot when interest rates change. That's why he tried to bail out of seeing it through.
For $50 and $4.20
I would question how deeply he thought about the price and how much of that was his thumbing his nose at the SEC.
Real leaders aren't going to look at what gets constant press and apply it to their divisions. That's just asinine. Also to think you need to provide extreme value to your employer because of "the times looking tough" is the media scaring you because you saw a market correction of layoffs and a significant event of someone Icahn-lifting a company.
I would say first try to provide as much value for yourself by building something that you own.
But trying to provide extreme value by working intensely is not a bad way to face life I would say. I want to work 8h hours (or less!) but I want to run hot all the time while I'm doing it. What's wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with that, but it's just not realistic to expect everyone to work like that.
If the terms aren't economic for both parties, they can't last. Long term I shouldn't be relying on getting value which other other people would be willing to pay more for.
I agree that there is bloat. But that has nothing to do with engineers.
But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics.
I also expect it's probably a good thing for the industry and the world when these imaginationless FANG companies stop wasting great years of talented engineers and stop being seen as some aspirational goal for everyone.
100% agree. Head count is like oil or Dune's Spice at these companies. Middle managers just want to grow the headcount under them to grow their own influence and get more power in whatever petty politics they are currently engaged in.
You are 100% right
No, my employer will keep dealing with my relatively good value. If he only wants to keep top performers, he will soon run out of engineers to actually do the work, both because he can't hire and the current ones will burn out.
Providing extreme value to your employer just means selling yourself for cheap and making him a bunch of money. "Hahaha, no" is an appropriate answer to such a demand.
I personally like working 8 hours a day in a very intense way. When I'm working I'm really working and I like high tempo, no bureaucracy, no BS, building solid stuff. In my opinion this is the way. Do 8h (no more, possibly less!) but give it all while you are at it.
Nothing is worth doing if it's not done well.
In all seriousness... Times change, this was bound to happen. Does it matter whose fault it is? Be adaptable and accept reality outside your control.
Whoever fault it is doesn't change the reality of the situation.
It's humans, causing pain for other humans. We have policies, laws, norms .. all categories have been violated repeatedly by Musk in this episode.
He's out of balance with humanity.
It's been decades we still don't know who was responsible for the 08 Financial Crisis nor the Great Depression.
Besides of course hand waving "greedy bankers", "unregulated speculative markets".
Is it man made? Yes. But it's also a chaotic system like the weather.
The fault of the layoffs is that somebody did a leveraged buyout. These have been terrible for workers and customers across all parts of our economy.
Twitter like many companies over hired during COVID and layoffs are healthy. I don’t think you can call the process at twitter anything but destructive.
Everybody hated LBOs when they were done by IBankers trying to make fees. Elon doing it is just as destructive.
Or the absolute idiocracy that is Venture Capital and growth at all costs. Or the middle managers at these companies that spent their time growing their influence to play politics and status / power games. Or you know, the average person who puts money aside on their 401K who in turn needs money managers who in turn end up partially funding venture capital...
It's chaotic. You can't point the finger at any single person or class and "blame them". It's a complex system made of many moving parts and somehow poorly understood incentives.
But you seem to have it all figured out. Good luck!
Event driven behavioral dictates if you want to avoid being confused by "Chaos."
Don't accept abuse or the abuser. Fight back.
- Attitude issues, bloat, free-loaders are not only found among the developers!
- Responsible parties for frivolous and ill conceived "wild company bets" are not the developers!
- "We have been treated like greek gods and goddesses and we are spoiled".
Not we. https://nitter.net/elonmusk
- Times indeed have changed. The "gods and goddess" were playing fast and loose with easy money and now the money is tight and they are looking at "BLOAT". They made poor decisions in terms of business models, growth, and those "cut" left with golden parachutes.
"I'm a strong believer in worker rights" + "Times are / have changed."
Indeed!
That being said... if he manages to run twitter with 20% of the people in a sustainable way that makes a lot of people look bad (including the devs).
The issue is that the silly money giant corps destroy the sensible norms for the rest of us innocents who never touched that crappy VC money. First they utterly fucked (can we say fuck on hn?) the interview process for all of us. Remember that? Now I guarantee you, every little man/woman "boss" out there is gonna follow 'the utterly spoiled greek god' and enforce the new 'one week job security window' for the rest of us who weren't being "spoiled" because we never deigned to work for these crappy companies!
"Are you in?" claims the loudly announced new 'greek god' hire of Elon the Terrible. Remember kids, you've heard all this before ..
p.s. every thing these megalomaniacs have touched has screwed something major in society. Surveillance capitalism; destroying the political discourse; etc.
Every single one of these disasters is 100% the responsibility of these supremely self-satisfied "gods" like Elon. Not us developers.
When are they going to face the "hard core" judgment?
But you can't reduce the bloat by just waltzing in and tearing out pieces. Bloated processes, companies and software are often tightly coupled in annoying ways and you first have to spend time removing all this coupling before you can maybe decide to cut some of it out.
Should he be forced to shut up and not give out free info/advice just because he sells advice? Why doesn't rhia complaint apply to every entrepreneur or brand that posts on Twitter? Heck, or even news outlet?
He's not forcing you to look. Many people find his info valuable and worth sharing.
People talk about how managers and CEOs will react if kelon succeeds, but it is at least equally important to think about how employees might react. Any move in my org in this direction and I'm jumping ship right away, I may not even waiting until I get an offer elsewhere.
Few things piss me off more the "genius jerk" like kelon. Like, I like to think I am a peaceful person but people like that, I just want to destroy fully. Instead of being humbled and grateful for your talent and celebrate your hardwork and help others get to where you are, you use your accomplishment as an asshole badge.
If you want to understand kelon or anyone really, but especially leaders, you must understand what their life and experience was during their developmental years(12 and under). Examples include: trump and how his father treated him when he was a kid, Putin and how he grew up in the shadow of his WW2 war hero brother or Xi and how he grew up in the middle of the chaos of Mao's great leap forward. Elon Musk (kelon) grew up in apartheid south africa in a rich emerald mining family, jewels are why apartheid existed basically. when you see that and his relationship with his parents , suddenly you see how he sees employees and bosses and how things should be done to increase wealth and why his companies are uniquely racist infested to the point several lawsuits (repeatingly across jursidictions) over racial hostility keeps happening against Tesla.
I double checked wiki, it says when his parents divorced he lived with his father not mother like you said and his father was wealthy and a half owner of an emerald mine. The part about him coming to canada without thise riches is right. He did make a fortune from paypal though which you can claim was a genius idea but as the GP comment points out he did get several things wrong before he succeeded, his paypal wealth cushion helped. Every kid in tech and their mother had ideas of self driving cars, flying cars, spaceships. His courage to pursue wild ideas and lead technical people means nothing to the cruelty and arrogance he displayed. Nothing he can or has done makes up for that.
If someone cured cancer but supported legalization of child abuse I wouldn't give a shit about how they cured cancer either. You gotta be nice to people and humble, sorry, no amount of money or genius makes you an exception.
Take your elon, kanye and trump and keep them to yourself.
If you’ve worked at Twitter, you are one of the richest people in the world. Take those 1337 code skills somewhere else and stop complaining.
Cruel sounding messaging here, @exabrial, to me ears. Saying "whining", specifically suggests the employees are in the wrong, because to whine is generally a shameful act.
Darth Vader said it best, "Pray that I do not alter the deal further." It's an abusive situation...and that is generally a bad thing for humanity's sake.
In Nature, for sure an individual's solution to an overpowering (leader's) cruelty is to leave. That doesn't mean what's going on in the first place is right. In Humanity, we get to assert as a mega society, what is acceptable behavior. This Twitter stuff is not right and should not happen. It is bad and leads to worse things for all of us.
It was an open secret about how badly he treats Black workers but people anre finally reacting like he’s doing something bad.
The task is to destroy the hype machine and his ego.