Twitter staff cut after Sat deadline because they didn't check email on weekend | Hacker News Reader

Twitter staff cut after Sat deadline because they didn't check email on weekend

businessinsider.com

19 pointsluu28 comments

I think the real problem is not Musk's antics, but laws that allow something like that to happen in the first place.

This situation is just a symptom of a deeper problem.

People argue against themselves and push a broken narrative that work laws and regulation stifles growth.

We're seeing this being pushed by the UK media at the moment regarding our unions.

Conspiracy theory: Musk is trying to play the Dickensian villain in order to convince Americans to finally fight for their rights in the workplace. But America just accepts all the ridiculousness so he pushes further and further. Making more and more ridiculous demands.

He’s signaling that he’s deployed anti-leaking software and sees himself something of a KGB mastermind.

He wants to try and make these less binding agreements more binding so he can find a way to inflict punishment on anyone who disagrees with him.

AKA neo-conservative ‘freedom’

A society where laws tried to cover every edge case would be one that’s extremely difficult to navigate.

Advanced societies tend to work well because people tend not to push laws to their limits. They try and follow some basic principles even if it’s not required by the law because people understand it’s far better for everyone to follow making govt regulation unnecessary.

A trivial example of this is that as far as I’m aware there are no laws against cutting lines anywhere in the world. And yet nearly everyone in richer countries I’ve been too tend to follow those rules, whereas in poorer countries they don’t (at the very least, in most poorer countries you will have a large number of VIPs who will cut to the front of the line immediately).

If you’re a sociopath who is constantly looking to exploit other people’s decency, and don’t care that in most cases they will Just give you a dirty look, You could spend the rest of your life cutting to the front of the line in the US and never lose anything for it. And eventually people would get tired and ask for it to be regulated.

That would be a massive net loss for society overall. Regulations usually carry significant cost. So even though the benefit may outweigh the cost, the much superior situation was when society in general did the “right thing” without having to impose the cost of regulation.

> A society where laws tried to cover every edge case would be one that’s extremely difficult to navigate.

Agreed. At the same time though, I think worker protection is an area where US could benefit a lot from extra laws – obviously there's a point where too much would be suffocating, but it's not at that point yet.

You're probably not wrong, I was waiting in line at a Costco in New Jersey one time, and some beefcake and his girlfriend tried cutting in line. There was an altercation almost immediately, verbal at first, then the beefcake shoved someone and ended up getting dragged outside and having the living shit kicked out of him by four bland looking suburban dads while his girlfriend was screaming and trying to use her phone (she had kind of insane fake nails). It was one of weirdest things I've ever witnessed.

I would like to point to a small counter example for this: the whole western Europe.

The answer is to make it easier to unionize. Then the law won't need to cover every edge case; instead, those details will be negotiated as part of the union contract.

Why are people still working there? Is it just those who are stuck on a visa or have severe financial problems? Are these people truly enthusiastic about the mission?

I think its probably the opposite - those who are "stuck" want to be there. The pure fact that twitter still functions without a problem after laying off half of employees is a testament that they werent needed (although it is still soon to tell).

Don't say "poor IT workers" please .... its emberrasing.

I doubt there’s a single major tech website which will stop functioning within months even if you layoff the entire tech staff.

If that happened, it would imply that running the website requires constant manual human intervention.

The problems arise as time and debt accrues and when you try and make changes.

And every change Twitter has made has been a mess so far. Twitter Blue being implemented and then unimplemented and then postponed. The whole ElonJet block, unblock, block saga.

Drawing any judgments about Twitter right now is way too early in either direction.

Most tech companies took on too many workers during the pandemic and so most have a lot of fat to cut. The big issue with Twitter’s cuts were their arbitrary nature, as opposed to the size of the cut necessarily.

We will see the impact, if any, over the next couple of years as Twitter has to start introducing new changes.

And yet its apparently enough time to say things like 'every change is a mess'.

> The big issue with Twitter’s cuts were their arbitrary nature, as opposed to the size of the cut necessarily

There is collateral damage to basically any intervention. Its most probable that detailed analysis of every employee would not be financially and temporarly justified. And you can always bring most people back if you really want tha.

I disagree, many of them are likely on H1B visas, which are tied to employment and you need to find a job within a specific time range before the visa is revoked.

Those poor IT workers....

Statistics dictates there might, just might, be one or two that believe him.

The rest are probably a mix of visa lock-in, 2 months from retirement, not quite found somewhere to land, and "self-sacrifice" going down with the ship to try and limit the blast radius

Could it be that, given that other tech companies (and that includes giants), are laying off quite a bit, it's just too risky to quit and it's better to just play for time ?

I mean if I had the choice between $10k per month or $0 for the next few months during a recession, I'd bite my tongue and stay with the bad guy for as long as possible.

Maybe he's offering them more money?

Seems like a ploy to fire employees who don’t work over the weekend?

Otherwise it just seems tremendously idiotic.

No need for a ploy. Employment in the U.S. is at will, and this type of thing would not be enough to fire European workers.

Once again, HN is biting hard on Elon clickbait. Hook, line, and sinker.

Unsurprising to see this was posted by a salty ex-employee like Dan Luu.

Why is there even a need to renew your commitment to a NDA? It's a legally binding document that you signed when you started employment, not a pledge.

Having them send a new email renewing their "pledge" has literally no effect and makes no change to anything.

“Cut off” not “cut”. HN title is misleading.

Adding "off" makes it too long for HN

Removing "off" makes it sound like they were fired when they weren't...

But switching "cut off from work systems" to "cut" fundamentally misleads about what's happening.

This hacker news headline is misleading and untrue

I bet chatGPT could work it out /s

Ignoring the obvious issues for a moment, what if the employee needed to talk to his lawyer before signing this?

Less than 24 hours during the weekend does not seem like a reasonable period for a legal document.

"Twitter staff cut" is fundamentally misleading and untrue. The staff were not cut, they were cut off from work systems when they wouldn't agree to not leak. The staff were not cut.

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