Is it Legal? Elon Musk ultimatum. Do ‘extremely hardcore’ work or get out

In My Humble Opinion
161

The only thing I saw from Musk didn’t say anything about screenshots of actual code. He said they had to bring a screenshot showing their checkins for the last six months, and that they had to explain the value to the company of those checkins.

That’s very different than having someone bring in a screen shot of a screen of code, which would be stupid.

It seems to me that one explanation for what Elon is doing is that he’s trying to get rid of all the low productivity employees.

Back in GE’s old days, they had a rubric for employees that said 10% are the ‘vital few’ who are responsible for 80% of the company’s productivity. The next 80% are the average performers, who are needed to run the day to day things and do the easier stuff that must be done. The bottom 10% are a waste of everyone’s time and shouldn’t be in the company unless they can rise out of it. This is an application of the Pareto principle.

Musk also knows the statistic that says the productivity ratio between the best programmers and the worst can be as much as 10-1 if you just count code, or as much as 100X if you count bugs the poor programmers introduce, the HR hassles they can cause, damage to team cohesion, etc. The job of HR was to find and retain the vital few, make sure the middle 80% are reasonably satisfied, and either ease the bottom 10% out the door or retrain them to get out of the bottom 10%.

So Musk starts out by culling a whole lot of backoffice staff he thinks he doesn’t need - salespeople, content moderators, government liason types, DEI administrators, whatever. People not involved in actually building the platform.

Then, he goes through the coding staff, but this time he’s not doing it blindly, but he’s counting on his ability to spot talent by looking at what they’ve been doing for the last six months, code-wise.

In the end, he gets a much smaller, but higher performing workforce. He gets rid of a lot of dead weight during ‘mass’ layoffs, without having to worry about being sued for wrongful dismissal if he does it one at a time slowly. It’s hard to claim discrimination when the same rules are being applied to the entire company.

As for why people would stay, he’s said that for those who are left, extreme perforance will result in extreme rewards in the form of bonuses and stock options.

Also, high performing people can leave jobs because they are sick and tired of carrying the low performers. There may be a lot of people at Twitter secretly happy that Musk is getting rid of the useless ones and giving the best more rewards and less need to cover the work of others.

Now, I’m not justifying any of this - just offering an alternative view. It might be that Musk has gutted the company of all the best people, or it could be that he’s managed to gut all of the chaff, and he’s managed to keep most of the cream of the crop. Maybe those backoffice people he thought were useles turn out to be critical and he just doesn’t know it. Maybe his heavy-handed methodology has alienated everyone and made Twitter a toxic place to be.

162

And they’re going to believe that?
I’m starting to understand why so many fall for scams.

163

Yeah, like the payroll department which is rumored to have left en masse. They’re sort of important even if their jobs are sexy or glamorous or “hardcore” or whatever.

164

Musk’s companies seem to retain an awful lot of very good engineers. He must be doing something to keep them. Believe it or not, there are a lot of engineers out there who want to work on new things, who want to hitch their wagon to a visionary with money who empowers them to make decisions, etc. This is as important to them as money. Musk attracts a lot of high performing people, because Musk’s companies tend to get things done.

Would you rather be an engineer at NASA working on the same subsystem ofthe same rocket for 20 years, or would you rather be at SpaceX where frontiers are being pushed and new things built all the time? Would you rather be an engineer at the bottom of a rigid hierarchy, doing what the boss tells you to do regardless of whether or not it is stupid, or would you rather work at a company that empowers engineers at the bottom to push back on *anything if they can justify it?

Some people like that atmosphere, and others want job security and good benefits and don’t much care. Musk wants the former types.

165

As has been mentioned, there probably are engineers that would join on SpaceX, rather than a more stable and profitable job at Boeing because they see SpaceX as an exciting job, and Boeing as a boring job.

That has nothing to do with twitter.

And that’s a large part of Musk’s problem. He thought that people were as excited to be a part of a social media platform as they were about sending rockets into space, and that’s just a pure failure to understand anything about human nature.

166

Cite?

167

That’s a reasonable point. It could be that Musk’s ability to retain good engineers is *despite his behaviour and attitudes, not because of it, and now that he’s trying it at Twitter, he’ll fail.

Or, he’s got plans for Twitter that we don’t know about, and it might be something that attracts engineers. I suspect Bluesky is part of Twitter’s future, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jack Dorsey coming back in some capacity - maybe even reinstated as CEO at some point. Musk has said a lot of interesting things about a Twitter future - becoming a broker for micropayments, hosting video to compete with Youtube which is rapidly pissing off serious content creators, etc.

Personally, if I were at Twitter in the past I would have found it a bit discouraging. Twitter seems almost static, in the sense that there hasn’t been much innovation. How long did it take them to go from 140 characters to 280? That doesn’t seem like something an ambitious engineer is particularly excited about. What else new has happened at Twitter in the past decade? Maybe it needed a big shakeup, and maybe re-envisioning it was what was needed to get and retain top engineering talent.

But we don’t really know. No one knows what Musk’s ultimate plans are. Don’t forget that he’s not doing this alone - investors have invested billions in this. David Sacks and Jack Dorsey aren’t stupid, and they’ve bet billions on Musk. Dorsey probably knows more about Twitter than anyone else, and he’s been a big fan of the Musk takeover. He also decided to keep 1.5 billion in stock rather than sell it at Musk’s inflated price. Clearly he thinks Twitter has a future, and I would trust his judgment over those of some internet randos or disgruntled ex-Twitter employees.

What I’m seeing on the SDMB so far is a lot of Musk hatred, and very few facts. Everyone is making assumptions or projecting their own feelings on the situation. I think part of the mood affiliation is that Twitter has long been seen as a venue that primarily advantaged the left, and that might change. I saw similar gnashing of teeth when Rupert Murdoch retired and his kids took over Fox. Everyone on the right was worried that the kids were ‘progressives’ and would change the editorial policy of the network. Politics trumps everything.

168

…NASA. They put a man on the fricken moon.

Plenty of facts have been presented in all of the threads on Twitter.

169

If he had some sort of plans that would inspire people to work for him, shouldn’t he have communicated them before workers started leaving?

170

Maybe Twitter needs a songbook.

171

:thinking:

Maybe since 2020. But Donald Trump lived on Twitter and IMHO accomplished a lot of his most societally corrosive propaganda through it.

172

If it was, it was only by default because it was moderating blatant lies, hate speech, and disinformation, which is primarily the purview of the right. It’s no surprise that those folks left Twitter to build their own platforms where they could revel in a fact-free bubble.

173

That’s a fool’s bet. It’s a startup that’s taken $44B in funding and not giving their employees equity up-front. You’d make more money working two jobs with your 80 hours/week.

174

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, I guess I was really meaning to ask about market cap.

ASL_v2.0 was saying “no one earns a billion dollars”. But if his Elon’s crazy management style lets him sell Twitter for $50 billion, didn’t he earn the difference? Particularly since these would be sweeping changes that would not have occurred otherwise.

The people who worked for him also got paid for their labor (quite well in many cases). Presumably many of them might also hold equity in Twitter.

175

Not anymore they don’t. Musk bought out the former shareholders. (Jack Dorsey retained a percentage, but I don’t think anybody else did or was allowed to.)

176

This is totally irrelevant. Neither SpaceX nor Tesla got gutted by laying off or losing 2/3 of they employees in a week.
I’ve done performance appraisal using the Welch model, which is common in Silicon Valley. It does not involve acting like only top performers do any useful work. Top performers innovate, they lead, they architect, they do the difficult coding, but they won’t have time for any of this if they are expected to do all the coding. You think the 1200 people who took the severance package are all bottom ranked employees?
One big problem is that if you do decent hiring, and do get rid of the bottom 10%, you shouldn’t have a staff that is 10% unsatisfactory and 80% mediocre after a few years. If you do, fire the hiring managers. (You surely don’t let HR make hiring decisions about technical people, right?)
I haven’t read the recent book on Jack Welch, but have read the reviews, and let’s not forget his policies killed GE - conveniently after he retired.

177

At least they got the benefit from Elon overpaying for Twitter, so there’s that.
When Oracle bought Sun we got money for all our Sun stock and any options not underwater. We didn’t have the option of holding them or converting to Oracle stock. I assume the case for Twitter was the same.

178

My nephew worked for Tesla for a year or two, coding for autopilot. It was a normal job. He may have worked long hours, but he wasn’t worried about a sudden layoff, he had normal support staff that was pretty stable while he was there. It was nothing like being at Twitter today.

179

I am guessing people from other Musk companies will also get-in on all these ‘hardcore’ work opportunities. Someone’s gotta get into Twitter’s finance offices to keep the books in order, prepare required finacial statements, and cut all those severance checks.

180

You say that, but this alternative view seems to involve a whole lot of explaining away contrary evidence. That could be okay in a “devil’s advocate” way, but then you treat it like it’s equally likely to the stuff that is backed by actual evidence. So you definitely come across as defending Musk, but just including a disclaimer that you might be wrong.

The overwhelming evidence shows that Musk is managing Twitter poorly. Companies like Twitter need their PR to be good to function. And their PR is really bad right now. His publicly traded companies are losing money. Musk is publicly showing a lack of knowledge in how to run the platform, harming the platform even further. He’s made really dumb decisions like the “pay for verification” option. He’s shown himself to be very vain, prioritizing shutting up the people who parodied him. He makes unreasonable demands, and has had systems shut down that should function.

There’s not really a way to argue that this is Musk’s 4-D chess master plan other than by motivated reasoning, people wanting Musk to be who his personal mythology says he is. Musk has quite clearly made a lot of bad decisions. His whole thing is managing expectations and PR, and he’s failing at it.