Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time

arstechnica.com

17 pointsrurp15 comments

If I’m reading this right, staff are usually paid on the 28th. So we’re 1 day later and the claim is that a personal account is in overdraft as a result?

This is probably a hot take, but it's not Twitter's problem that people earning a big tech salary are so incapable of budgeting that a paycheck delayed by a single day necessitates calling their mortgage lender or incurring overdraft fees.

Having my pay delayed would cause me problems precisely because I budget well. On payday I have 20+ automatic transfers into various accounts (utilities, car, mortgage, etc) leaving my chequing account with only enough to service my automatic for the month. If my pay is late my transfers will fail and automatic payments will either leave me in overdraft or will fail (I'm not sure which, because it has never happened).

Isn't this a JIT buffer problem?

You have optimized the slack out of your payments system, and can't handle disruptions

Maybe, but where I live there are very serious penalties for my employer if they fail to pay me on time even once. And I can and will be made whole. And it has never happened in my 15+ years operating this way.

Whatever works for you, but you really should have a buffer. Mistakes happen. Serious penalties won't fix that.

I would argue you're not budgeting well if your budget doesn't have any buffer room for mistakes or emergencies. I would think this would be fairly obvious.

Paying your employees on time is the most important thing a business does. If the employer can't do that, they shouldn't be in business at all.

In California there are severe penalties for being late and effectively taking an interest-free loan: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_waitingtimepenalty.htm

And a tabloid headline designed to falsely imply cash flow problems rather than anything else

Really? The article pretty much matches exactly what I was expecting from the headline.

> suggesting that the problem is one of staffing and operations, rather than a systematic refusal to pay workers. “The company is just not run well,” said one former UK staff member affected.

There is not much reason to expect Twitter to suddenly close up shop this week, but there are a lot of reasons to expect various operations to be having a lot of issues. Paying people on time is one of the more basic expectations people have for large employers. Failing to do so is just another sign of current leadership incompetence.

It also happened before Musk purchased it.

This subject has appeared three or four times in the last two days. It's too much. Can we please talk about interesting things?

This thread currently isn't even on or near the front page. You have deliberately sought it out in order to complain that anyone at all is discussing it.

Hah! Good observation, M_MP. Doci Veritas.

This isn't Reddit.

Yeah, exactly. It was I think the third that I found as I looked at 'new' and I got annoyed.

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