Twitter has reportedly laid off product manager Esther Crawford
engadget.com
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Also, unless it is MY business I wouldn't grind this hard.
I can put it some extra hours once a year. But if its a failure of management then I will maybe save them once. Then, they can do the job themselves after my 40 hours.
If an individual told me they slept at the office to meet deadlines, I would tell them to seek treatment as that isn't normal.
The rest of the hospital just kinda follows that mantra. And that makes sense -- everyone works that way in the hospital and no one dies.
That ain't how software dev works, and no one is going to die or go into insulin shock because Twitter didn't push a UI update to Prod on schedule.
Are you in the US? Do you work for hourly wages?
I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week. There's an employment agreement between you and your employer with expectations on what tasks you'll perform. Rarely (never in my experience) does the agreement include you only work 40 hours a week.
I don't have an issue with your overall sentiment. I'm mostly confused about conflating things like overtime and a 40 hour work week when most folks in tech in the US are salaried workers.
Self-respect/their own lines in the sand?
I don’t think anyone is under the illusion they can’t be fired for holding this position given that you can be fired in the US for ~anything. Doesn’t mean it’s a nonsense position to hold.
I'm not sure on that. It's backed by very little legally or culturally.
Lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, and other high paying, salaried professions include the expectation of more working hours, many times unexpectedly, to get the work done.
Wanting the higher wages associated with a salaried position but the stability of hourly work seems like it's backed by little but personal entitlement.
Having negotiating power gives you all sorts of “entitlements” that aren’t written down anywhere, that’s the point of having negotiating power.
The silly thing would be to earn all this negotiating power and then choosing to be miserable anyway because other people might call you entitled pejoratively.
“9-5” is a very well known cultural concept. Around the world. The 40 hour work week is a well known cultural concept. Around the world. To say it’s not is literally ignoring decades worth of media making it known.
Sure there’s nothing legally known as overtime when you’re salaried, but theres most certainly an implied cultural construct of a 40 hour work week and WLB around that number. While you may not be legally performing overtime, you most certainly are culturally if you work above 40 hours.
Isn't it? I thought this was exactly what people fought for 100 years ago: to limit the standard work week to 40 hours. The US played a leading role in that fight, and it's incredibly sad to see how Americans have forgotten their history.
> Lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, and other high paying, salaried professions include the expectation of more working hours, many times unexpectedly, to get the work done.
If you've got a job that depends on unexpected events, then of course there's going to be some irregularity. For most software engineers, that's not really an issue because their work can be planned and won't kill someone if it's not done by tomorrow. System administrators may be an exception in that they have to fix a server right now when there's an issue. But that's a different issue than making overtime standard, and I would expect those admins to be well compensated for their work during off-hours.
At-will employment is definitely a double edged sword but it does give employees the power to tell their employer to get lost if they're being unreasonable, even if it isn't written in something legally binding.
This is the comment you replied to. It gave two possibilities if you were working a salaried job over 40 hours a week.
Employment contracts in most developed countries will specify a) hours of business/office hours and b) an expected number of hours that the employee is to work. In many countries (including the UK for example [1]), there are even laws restricting the number of working hours by default.
[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1998/1833/contents/made
Exactly - you can also work less if nobody notices (easy to pull off).
$400k to work 50hr/week vs $250k to work 20hr/week. What do you choose?
Let’s say 100k base salary. 5% additional comp (bonuses or stock, this is conservative number). Healthcare for you, another $300/month, not even counting employers who cover dependents. Ignoring all taxes including FICA. PTO 3 weeks (120 hours).
Base salary is 48/hour, but your total comp will bring it to more like 58/hour. Which is probably more than your contractor counterparts.
You trade a little bit more of your time (responding to outages or crunching for a product launch deadline) for the security and benefits.
If one of my employees refused to respond to an outage because it’s outside 9-5 working hours, I would fire them for cause (pending approval from legal of course).
There was a study that claimed losing a job caused the same level of grief for some as losing a loved one. Don't be that person. You are just a mercenary on contract, you are not part of a mission, or saving the world or (ugh), a FAMILY.
I am paid for completing work, I don't get paid hourly.
My employer understands I work about 40 hours a week give or take here and there.
I have interviewed for some of the biggest companies in the US and the information I received was 40hrs a week, with some crunch during fires but very rare.
This is why I would never interview for company like Tesla.
It's cultural. Living in Europe, I've always been confused how salaried workers would not have set hours per week in the US.
I'm literally selling my working hours to a company. Of course the contract is going to have to include exactly how many hours I'm selling and how much money I'm getting in return.
It is an employment contract. I'm not selling the completion of a specific task or a project (that would be a different type of contract and I would price it very differently), I'm selling specific hours my time.
All my full time contracts have had the amount of hours I am expected to work + how overtime work is to be handled.
Additinally, there's laws setting an upper limit on the amount of hours (at least in the few countries where I've worked)
In fact, it's codified into law and payroll systems have clear delineations about how this works. Companies often have 2 classes of workers referred to as "exempt" (these are salaried workers) and "non-exempt" (hourly workers), where what the "exempt" refers to is whether the worker is exempt from overtime rules and other concerns.
Point being, if you are an exempt worker (which I'm guessing is like 95%+ of W2 employed programmers in the US), you won't be getting paid overtime.
That's not what “exempt” means, though its very common for those to correlate (you can be hourly exempt and salaried non-exempt.)
Plus, the last half of that sentence was "where what the "exempt" refers to is whether the worker is exempt from overtime rules and other concerns", which very much is what exempt means. The US Department of Labor has more details: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
For my part, I am confused why anyone would work more than 40; get your work done and leave.
"Only"? Isn't 40 hours the maximum that people once fought for? Nobody should have to work more than 40 hours per week. It's the maximum for very good reasons. If you work more, it should be compensated elsewhere.
Now if you're co-owner of the company with wide-ranging responsibilities and corresponding generous compensation and a share of the profits, I can understand that you want to put in extra work, but then you're also the person directly benefitting from that extra work. But that's a voluntary choice by someone with a direct stake in the company. It should not be abused to extort extra work beyond the 40 hour maximum from normal employees.
This is reasonable advise if you're an average worker, who can be replaced by thousands of others, but if you're the only one being able to do the Job in your company, or even one of a hand full of people in your industry to do what you do, you need to change perspective a bit.
Almost two decades ago, before I became a PMC, I got hired as a Marketing Specialist for a Taiwanese computer components manufacturer that wanted to expand their core business into the high-end consumer segment.
When I started working there it was completely expected to show up to work two hours before you were contractual obliged and work overtime each day. Coming from a cultural background where you clock out when it's time and don't give a f*ck, I thought as well this was nuts.
But for my Taiwanese co-workers this wasn't an issue at all and they were happy, and so I adapted to their work culture, sometimes we slept in the office, showered and had breakfast there together.
It was a great time. We blew the competition completely out of the water because we simply outworked them and in return, besides getting casino money to spend on the weekends and other benefits, we each got the equivalent of a million dollars in local currency as a bonus by the end of the year and another one deposited as retainer with one of the best law firms in the country so we didn't really have to worry about anything.
My youngest brother got severely ill and needed experimental treatment. The company paid for it. My neighbor started acting up, doing parties all night. The company took care of it. My parents wanted to live closer to me, because my mom got sick not seeing me more than once a year. You guess it, they bought the flat next to me and had them move in for Christmas without me knowing.
That money helped me to start my own business and become independent later. My work ethics never changed. During my career I slept on floors, in bathtubs, once on a park bench, and never stopped working until the job was done.
I am sure that whoever survived at Twitter until now, is reaping these kind of benefits I know from my time grinding for a billionaire. There is nothing wrong with sleeping on the floor to meet a deadline, even regularly, if you know it's worth for whom you do it and why you do it.
According to the article some of those who grinded for this billionaire are recently applying for unemployment.
I do not want a company doing anything for me. I want to maximize my income TO DO whatever I WANT. I don't want my personal life getting tangled with work life.
I feel sorry for people who have to work with you. Sleeping in bathtubs, floors sounds just insane.
You sound like you have very little respect for yourself.
I don't understand at all what this means.
Except there’s basically everything wrong about it.
- She VERY obviously didn't learn her lesson. See her tweets after the layoff.
- The insane number of people responding with positive encouragement for "how hard [she] worked" and how it sets a good example. What a fucking travesty of a work culture some people have.
VALUE YOUR OWN TIME PEOPLE. All she did was help Elon attempt to recover a stupid business decision, and her reward was being sent back into the job market to do the same thing for some other billionaire in the future. This is the TEXTBOOK definition of being taken advantage of, combined with some astonishing stockholm syndrome.
Meh. She's saving face. Very high chance she feels like an absolute idiot on the inside but admitting as much doesn't help her maintain social media cred.
Based on how fervently she's defending herself, that seems likely to me.
But yes you're absolutely right that there was no chance she was going to actually admit it was a bad idea for her to commit like this. People don't like admitting that stuff and will do whatever they can to avoid it.
I find this lack of empathy disturbing. What if this person values the time they spend on making twitter better? It's quite likely that there are people that enjoy their job so much they are willing to prioritize it over most other things.
> I find this lack of empathy disturbing. What if this person values the time they spend on making twitter better? It's quite likely that there are people that enjoy their job so much they are willing to prioritize it over most other things.
There are also people that enjoy drugs so much they are willing to prioritise them over most other things. It's hard to know at which point fun turns into pathology.
1. How has Twitter has gotten better?
2. What does making Twitter have to do with sleeping in the office and boasting about it?
1. The need to even sleep at the office in the first place was solely as a result of Musk's "chaos management". He dug the hole, and it is true that at the end of the day the only folks benefitting from her going the extra mile are Musk and Twitter investors/shareholders.
2. Wanting to do great work is one thing - sleeping at the office, though, clearly means that you are sacrificing other parts of your life, like your family, friends, health and hobbies, and putting work above all else.
As someone who used to be a workaholic, I can sympathize with Ms. Crawford. I can certainly look back at my work history and be proud of the times I worked hard to get a good result. But I also have plenty of regrets about working just for the sake of working/my identity, without really thinking critically about where I was spending my time.
But I always slept in my own bed. My extra work was mostly from home. The one bad idea was the massive pay cut, and that was a temporary situation (that I justified by considering it an investment to get more experience in a leadership role).
I don't naturally tend towards workaholism (unlike my wife), but when a job is sufficiently interesting and engaging, I do put in extra work, but it also makes me wary that I shouldn't mske that the new standard; it's always an exception.
https://mobile.twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/163007302491...
> The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos.
[0]: https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/163004021988091494...
What's this based on? I'd imagine a lot of the people jeering and mocking are actually working on building products
he is eroding any loyalty the still employed employees may have. if they're smart employees, anyway. if they're not smart, he doesn't want them.
on personal sacrifice for an employer:
the belief that working hard and sacrificing your personal time will bring promotion and reward in the US is severely misplaced in 2023, especially with any publicly traded company, or even a private company beyond a certain size. each employee becomes a resource just like water or electricity or compute or storage, and good behavior is neither noticed nor rewarded. resources are managed as resources, and not as people. certainly not as beings which grow and improve with proper care and feeding.
The whole point was that they don't have a free pass.
> went to people actually born here
Something, something a nation of immigrants.
This was written like someone who has never been an immigrant or even taken a second to think about how difficult the process of immigrating is.
Every step of the process is meant to deter you from continuing, you’re scrutinized for the most minor of things anytime you cross the border, and, guess what, you still had to get the equivalent education and skills to get the job anyway.
I mean, both are what she deserved? I.e. expecting any sort of loyalty/humanity from a psychopathic billionaire, but also additional job offers because of her devotion. I mean, if she wants to sleep at work until she retires, good for her.
I'll sleep at home thanks.
Basically the Performance Improvement Plan followed by a firing method?
The lesson here is that a PIP is a polite way to be shown the door; lead time to look for a new job, essentially.
In fairness, it's a photo she didn't take or post. The quote tweet could have been damage control as much as people think it was humble bragging
- The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest
My comment was more related to how bad an idea unions are under the Wagner Act rather than anything concrete to these employees' experiences.
I have no problem if employers want to bargain with a single authority, and I have no problem if an employee wants to only work for a company if they can outsource their bargaining. I do have a problem with the law that says that it a majority of people want to unionize then all other employees must join the union and the employer must bargain only with the union. It is nonsense and tyranny. It also leads to terrible band-aid laws like Right to Work.
I mean unions are kinda clunky as far as political instruments go but they've at least got the spirit of what the point of it all is. A country where the thing people do for the majority of their working hours is shitty misses the forest for the trees.
I wouldn't want my family to be a democracy either.
Like do y’all not have a visceral reaction to “my house my rules” or “because I said so.” Do you look back on that fondly?
Like by any objective measure I had great parents but I’ve never looked back and realized they were right when they blindly asserted their authority. Other stuff sure, but the things I fought my on parents then I still think are shitty.
Why do you think non unions are fedual states? The way I see it, unions require:
- Forced periodic taxes in membership
- No self representation in negotiations
- Policies largely derived by "status" in the form of length of service, tenure, etc. uncorrelated with performance
- At any point in time the tyranny of the majority can descend on an otherwise libertarian environment and forcibly turn it into a feudal state
While non-unions allow:
- Individual representation and negotiation
- Policies related to merit or other unstructured agreements (e.g., I'll work during Diwali if you work during Easter)
- No forced requirement to pay taxes to any authority other than the government
willing to work even hardcore(rerer).
we are all disposable