As someone who works in one of those “adult day cares” (and my wife shares your opinion of the decor), I agree with you in general but think this is a bit over-cynical. Of course everything any company provides to employees, even just salary, is fundamentally for the purpose of getting more value from the employee than the value of the thing provided. Even abstractly “having a fun environment” attracts talent for a lower price than it would otherwise cost and is generally a net win for the company.
And meal prep is a chore, and I’d rather have someone else do it, so it is nice to have and I take a lower salary than I would demand if that was not provided. If the company can provide that at a price that is less than that salary bump it’s a win for both of us.
Right now Twitter has already lost the “fun work environment” premium a long time ago, and the “free food” premium just recently. If they ever want to stop losing employees (and maybe they don’t) they’re going to have to make that up some way.
Even if they did come up with something, after the past few weeks of chaos its motivational value would be severely degraded by the likelihood that it would be yanked away next time Elon haz a sad about adding 0.001% to the rate at which Twitter is hemorrhaging money.
If I was hiring ex-Twitter workers I think the metric I’d be inclined to use is the ones who left first are the ones I want. They have the most gumption and the most on-the-ball. If they vent their spleen a bit over someone destroying what they worked 60 hours a week to build for the last decade, well that’s fully understandable. Admirable in fact, as it shows dedication to a cause.
That assumes of course that I want the workers who get shit done, not the workers who are obedient low-productivity drones. Certain managers would definitely prefer Door #2; not I.
That’s good general advice. I probably don’t want to hire someone prone to airing dirty laundry in public. But Twitter is exploding very publicly. These employees aren’t doing anything that could hurt Twitter. They are bitching about bad decisions it has made very publicly. That’s just human. I wouldn’t hold that against them. And like @LSLGuy , i like an employee with a little gumption and honesty.
The difference is between an employee saying “here’s this bad thing you don’t know about”, which is generally poor form, and and an employee saying, “this thing you know about? Yeah, it’s bad.” If i agree with their judgement, I’m fine with the latter.
Yeah, D_Anconia’s linked article doesn’t really support his attempted point. The article is about how you shouldn’t use your interview for a new job as a space to vent or complain about your old job. You should be trying to impress your potential new employer with how enthused you are about the new job, not just how much you hated the old one. Even if you had good reason to hate it, don’t waste your potential new boss’s time with tedious airing of your old boss’s dirty linen.
But these Twitter threads aren’t job interviews. No potential new hire is taking up any interviewer’s time, much less betraying any confidential communications, by complaining about all this highly publicized spectacularly soiled executive linen in an online Twitter thread.
If a talented person worked for an employer as erratic as Elon Musk, and was about to jump ship or be pushed out, how sad it would be if that person absolutely felt he or she had to keep quiet online for fear of alienating a future employer. Fortunately, we live in an open society where many people recognize there are values beyond “What might my next boss think?”
I’ve hired numerous professionals. If a candidate spent their interview time trashing a prior company rather discussing what they can do for the job I’m interviewing them for, i would hold it against them. If they revealed confidential information about that prior employer, including how their boss treated them, i wouldn’t hire them. But if i trolled public sources like Twitter and Facebook and found they were bitching about the impact a company’s totally public mismanagement had on them, i would simply assume they were thinking human beings.
It wasn’t a Twitter employee who wrote (jokingly) about starving to death, was it?
The mistake that Twitter is making is that some of their biggest competitors for top talent provide lunch. And, second, providing free lunch keeps your employees pounding away at the keyboard. If they have to go out to get lunch, that’s time lost. And, third, morale is already pretty low at Twitter (I imagine), so this is just another nail in that coffin.
Again, that’s not the point of your linked article. The point of your linked article is that employers are (not unreasonably) wary of candidates who complain about previous employers in their job interview.
Of course hiring managers check out social media of prospective candidates for all types of potential red flags. But it would have to be a pretty dumb hiring manager who would interpret some Twitter-thread complaints about a public spectacle of a management disaster on the scale of Musk’s mishandling of Twitter as a “potential red flag”.
(And, again, the tweeter who originally used the “starving” phrase that sent you into your “whiny-little-snowflakes” rant in the first place was not AFAICT a current or former Twitter employee, making your attempted point even more irrelevant to your linked article that you tried to use to support it.)
I will say that it’s probably not incorrect to say that Twitter is slowed down unnecessarily by network calls to microservices for features that aren’t that important. Tech companies do accumulate bullshit bloatware features that nobody has the heart to kill.
Microservices are a foundational element of modern software architecture. “Turning off the microservices bloatware” is like Michael Scott ranting “the problem is we have too many files, and we’re going to start throwing them out, starting with that box right there.”
The way Musk phrased suggests that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. He could have said “we’re disabling underutilized features as an experiment to improve the low-bandwidth experience.” But based on what he actually said, it sounds like he’s repeating verbatim something he heard from one of his temporarily assigned Tesla scab-lackeys.
These people probably don’t understand the problem well, and aren’t describing it well, to a man who lacks the depth to tell the difference, yet cannot keep his mouth shut. Those of us who work in software have witnessed this pattern enough to understand that it only ends in tears.