That’s what I’m saying… the way he did it skates pretty close to what’s called “constructive dismissal”, meaning that rather than fire people, the employer just ratchets up the awfulness of the work/working environment until they quit, under the thinking that since they quit, the employer doesn’t owe them anything.
It’s illegal in most states, although it probably involves going to court to collect anything. But in a big, high profile case like this, it might be easier.
Twitter is losing institutional knowledge. That can never be recovered.
We’re supposed to document and put comments in our code. That’s still not a substitute for talking to the people that have maintained it for several years. I knew our payroll system inside out. I had written dozens of SQL reports against the database. I knew the tables and their relationships very well. I certainly wasn’t irreplaceable. However, a new guy can’t learn it overnight, especially without training from experienced staff.
It’s going to be a shit show at Twitter for a long time.
What always gets me is how pointless this is. You’re working your employees to an early grave for what, exactly? So those new Twitter features come out in March instead of May? Who gives a fuck.
Uh, @Revtim, yeaaah, I need to talk to you about your TPS reports…did you get the memo about the new cover sheets?
Stranger
Same. I don’t understand why some people see him as a hero. Hero of what?
The man who stands to make money from that feature between March and May gives many fucks. And in a dictatorial work environment, his fucks are the only ones that matter.
Utterly deplorable, but comprehendible enough.
I did put comments in my code, lots of them, but that was no substitute for documenting the architecture and design decisions, which I did before I retired. I bet no one has done that for Twitter code. I bet no one even documented the state of code in progress before they left.
During the AT&T trivestiture, the leaving package was so good that half of everyone left - with no hard feelings. A few people were considered so valuable that they were not given the package. They all left within six months.
Same thing happeneed at my company. They gave us amazing severance packages when they shut down the office. Very few people complained.
If I were a $200,000-$300,000 Twitter employee, I would be very worried about being able to find an equivalent job. Silicon Valley is currently laying off employees like crazy, and it’s going to get worse. Twitter is not an exception in this regard - it could be that anyone who owned Twitter needed to seriously downsize the staff.
Those employees who quit are going to be competing with the 11,000 Meta employees being layed off (three times as many as Twitter), Amazon just layed off 10,000 employees, Lyft cut 700. Stripe cut 1,100. Microsoft cut 1,000 jobs. Coinbase cut 1,100. And those are just some of the big ones. There are smaller layoffs going on all over the place. In addition, tech firms are leaving SF and California in general because of the high cost of living, crime, and because the workforce is expensive and demanding.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk moves Twitter to Texas. Dumping lots of employees could be a precursor to that. He wouldn’t do it now, but perhaps in a year or two.
Are you operating under the misapprehension that Twitter will still be a functioning social media platform “in a year or two”? Between the debt, multitude of mounting lawsuits, diaspora of entire teams of employees who are critical for keeping the system operational, loss of essential administrative business functions aside from coders and developers, fleeing of active users (i.e. the entire profit base of the company), and completely dysfunctional remaining executive management which is doing his level best to make it impossible for the platform to recover, I would be surprised if Twitter were even still an operational platform at Christmas. Musk can move whatever he wants to Texas but without people to run the organization and maintain the platform it is just a stupid icon and a “404 Not Found – HTTP” message.
Stranger
The position is quite different in Europe, where Twitter does have a large number of employees.
(Whole thread, that’s just the first Tweet.)
Similar to what happened at my company when they wanted to reduce staff (especially more expensive longtime employees). They offered a way too generous package and panicked when quadruple the number of people expected took the early retirement. They could keep some people for a little while, but a bunch of others were rehired as contract workers while they had all their retirement benefits. Expensive lesson.
If we were still allowed to wager here, I would gladly wager even money that Twitter will still exist in a year or two.
Be careful not to stay in a bubble. I keep reading how Twitter is shedding users like crazy, but according to Musk Twitter is gaining users at a rapid clip.
Elon makes mistakes because he moves fast, but like an Agile programmer he refactors quickly when things go wrong. I think we’re seeing the kind of iterative engineering philosophy applied to management of Twitter. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s interesting to watch Musk play it all out in public.
It’s nice to see the transparency, even if it does give ammo to his haters.
Conservative media have been talking this claim up for several years now, but facts don’t seem to be bearing it out.
That last point about draconian social-conservative legislation is another factor to bear in mind when speculating about the geographic future of in-person work. A significant number of educated young people have zero interest in living under homophobic, transphobic, abortion-banning state regimes.
Uh, Sam, Musk did not actually fire and rehire Twitter workers called “Ligma” and “Johnson”. That was a joke. There was no actual managerial “transparency” or admission of “mistake” or “refactor[ing] quickly when things go wrong” on Musk’s part.
Musk simps see him as a key ally in their culture war. It’s as simple as that. They’ll spin any dumbass thing he does as a 4-D genius chess move as long as he keeps “owning the libs”.
See above.
I don’t see any “philosophy” at all.
Certainly not anything having to do with “Agile” as I understand it.
Seventy-six trombones led the big parade / with a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuosos / the cream of every famous band!
The values and principles of Agile software development
The Musk takeover of Twitter has nothing to do with “Agile” philosophy. It started as a ‘joke’—I use that term in the loosest possible sense—with an oh-so-clever 4:20 reference with no due diligence, was elevated to a legal obligation with Musk doing everything to worm his way out of the purchase offer and poison the deal, then Musk went full in so as not to lose his $1B penalty payout, then walking into Twitter headquarters with a large sink for the lulz, then firing the executive management and half the staff almost immediately followed by misleading and confusing statements to remaining staff that are likely in violation of California employment law. Musk’s only ‘philosophy’, such as it can be said to exist, is “I can do what I want!”.
Musk has been fortunate enough to have attracted actually competent vehicles into his more successful ventures and then used those to mask his more obvious failures, but here he jumped right out into a very public sphere and into a platform that is used by many tens of millions of people, assuming that his dictums are some kind of fundamental law that would make people jump to satisfy his every whim, and like a spoiled toddler who has suddenly discovered the limit of his behavior by being put into the corner, he is now having a meltdown of epic proportions. It’s not as if Musk is suddenly going to become destitute, and cutting the valuation of Tesla in half is only about a quarter of the way to pushing it down to where it could credibly be based upon some reality, but Twitter as a platform and Musk as a genius-billionaire have lost that lovin’ feeling for all but his most diehard sycophants and adulators.
Stranger
As @Kimstu noted, that was a joke. “Ligma & Johnson” = “lick my johnson”.
Ooo… an increase of 1.2% from the low in July. Yay. Note the 240-some-million of the graph cut off to make it seem like a huge increase. And, if those numbers are to be believed, how many are to watch the shit show go down?
Or to post spam, porn, etc. now that the caretakers have left the zoo?
