Ligma made me pause, but with the & there the Ligma Johnson joke is broken. Typical Musk humor.
Maybe the reason that people don’t realize it’s a joke is because it’s not amusing at all. Honestly, I still don’t really get it.
Think “Heywood Jablome”.
Spoilered for crude humor:
Lick my Johnson
Musk is pathetically desperate to be seen as funny. Remember when he offered to buy The Onion back in 2014, and they told him to pound sand?
Normally, I’d think the owner of a company like Twitter shouldn’t be spending time trying to troll people online. In this case, though, maybe it leaves him with less time to ruin run the company.
Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form.
Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday would receive three months of severance pay, the message said.
In the midnight email, which was obtained by The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
I have twice worked for companies that tried to get me to sign a “loyalty pledge”. Neither of those companies is still in existence.
Stranger
That kind of culture works in a startup, where employees are showered with stock options that have the potential to make them millionaires if the company IPOs. That’s what motivates people to devote their life to the company and work 80+ hour weeks. Twitter may go public again in the future, but it’s hard to see how employee stock options will have all that much future value when Twitter currently has a bunch of debt and big investors who want to get their money back.
And no mention of paid overtime. Interesting, that.
Not really a thing in many salaried jobs. The expectation is that you’ll work the hours needed to get the work done.
And when will the work be “done”? What if it’s never done? What if there’s always more work? You’ve got to set boundaries.
What I see here is Musk demanding more work without offering more pay, now or in the future. What self-respecting person would take that offer?
California has no requirement for paid overtime for salaried employees. However, California employment law by default invalidates non-compete agreements and other “loyalty pledges” for workers who do not have an employment contract and puts some pretty significant limitation upon those that do. This pledge is a meaningless gesture which seems almost purposeful in driving out remaining employees.
Musk is like the child who didn’t get exactly what he wanted on Christmas and is now throwing a temper tantrum destroying what he did receive while telling the gift-givers what terrible people they are. This spectacular meltdown of a once-venerated man-child in public view brings peculiar warmth to my schadenfreude glands.
Stranger
Lol. Welcome to American business. That’s standard operating procedure.
I don’t necessarily disagree, and the tech industry, in particular, is known for long hours. I’m just saying that, ridiculous or not, long hours with no extra pay is the norm with many salaried professions.
Very few, unless they are the sort who already understand they are unlikely to find work elsewhere, which should seem counterproductive to a competent manager.
It works in startup culture because the hope is that by putting in the work and making the company a success, stock options will be worth millions someday soon.
To an extent, a bit of “overtime” is expected of salaried US employees. But the expectations of months and months of “hardcore” overtime is highly unusual for established companies where corresponding compensation will not be forthcoming. Usually the expectation is that big performance bonuses will be associated with that sort of work. Worse, we already know past a certain point, more overtime is counterproductive - it leads to mistakes that have to be fixed later.
This kind of expectation without compensation leads the good employees to quit - they can make more (or even just the same) money without killing themselves. It only leaves the poor performers or ones who can’t quit for whatever reason (health insurance, near retirement, etc).
My immediate thought was that Musk has gotten too comfortable managing people in Texas, so he’s unfamiliar with the requirements of running a company in a jurisdiction that actually has those “employment law” things.
But then I remembered that while the big work locations are in Texas, both SpaceX and Tesla have their corporate business offices in California, so there’s no excuse for him not to be aware of this.
I mean, other than his usual reckless Dunning-Kruger arrogance, of course.
I have friends who work in tech, so I’m familiar with the long hours, as well as with the concept of “crunch” when finishing a project. I agree that that’s just the nature of the beast, and tech people know that going in (and are compensated accordingly). What bothers me is the attitude that you’re only allowed to have a life outside work at you’re bosses’ discretion, if at all. This “hardcore” approach is the definition of a toxic and exploitive work environment.
Plus, as noted, if they want you to work longer hours, they should pay you more money. Your labor has value, and your time has even more.
Musk tried to run this game on SpaceX employees a number of years back when they started leaving to go to RocketLabs, Firefly, and other startups. Somebody consulted an employment lawyer and pointed out that the non-compete agreements were completely unenforcible. Musk also went down the path of claiming that anybody who had employment in the launch industry after having contact with SpaceX was assumed to be stealing their super-secret technology to build gas generator cycle RP1-LOX engines and attempted to sue everyone under the sun including former TRW employees under the thesis that they retrocausally stole the pintle injector concept by virtue of propulsion engineer Tom Mueller having brought it to SpaceX after having worked on the TRW Low Cost Pintle Engine family.
Elon Musk is a litigious, SLAPP-suing motherfucker who is spitefully vengeful about how he has been wronged by everyone who has ever said anything disagreeable to him or has just displeased him in any way, and now that he is balls deep into a social media company where nobody has any loyalty to him to cover up his raving bullshit it is coming out in a tidal flood of effluvium. He is so used to operating in an environment where people either “Yes, Sir!” him or quietly disappear, and all of his embarrassing behavior and stupid ideas are papered over by people who desperately need him to seem like an infallible visionary, he has no idea how to actually lead a company where people don’t share his ‘vision’ or can’t even figure out what that might be.
Stranger
That’s a good point. With SpaceX, rockets go up. With Tesla, cars go “vroom”. People can tell what the goal of their job is. The rest is details.
With twitter, the details are the platform.
Something I’m wondering:
What was Twitter’s stock option program, and did employees with options get a payday when Musk bought the company?
It’s entirely possible that a great many of his employees received significant paydays (I don’t mean retire now money, but quite possibly take a year off money) and are thinking “Yeah. I don’t need you, and thanks to you I have a year to figure out what next for me.”