Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. Instead, Musk has already laid people off to the point that they are trying to hire back people previously laid off and current employees are sleeping in the office. Now he is pushing even more people out the door with no control over what teams will be hurt the hardest.
In 2020 the company I worked for did ~25% temp salary reduction so they could feel safe that they could keep everyone employed and such. 3 months after everyone did it they said "thank you thank you we are so happy we don't need to let anyone go". 2 months later they laid off ~50% of the development team and people throughout the company...
At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying despite covid they made a profit.
Well yes, the actual best approach for the wellbeing of employee is to combine these two moves. Give employees the choice between taking a voluntary severance package or coming back to the office. Make it known that a round of layoffs is possible depending on the number of people who take the severance. That way no one is misled into moving and the company doesn't have to be as concerned with the distribution of people who refuse to work in the office.
And let's be honest, Musk isn't doing it in this order for the wellbeing of Twitter's employees.
A more deliberate (some might say sneaky, but I'd prefer it if I was in the situation) move would be to take an extra week or two to have some of your management do some feeling out of who would be 100% opposed to remote so you could include them in the layoff list, but also don't force people to uproot just to be laid off.
But at least you could avoid some of the "unregretted attrition" of people you decided to keep.
(This assumes Musk isn't intentionally sequencing things to limit the "official" size of the layoff while actually wanting to cut a significantly larger percentage.)
The other problem is that these unpopular decisions end up driving away the people who are the most confident about being able to find a new job, leaving you with less-skilled employees who maybe feel less comfortable job hunting.
> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed.
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
>then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.
Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many people are going to think twice about signing up to work for a company and owner that have a reputation for treating people as disposable trash.
Employees are the company's most valuable capital - so if you unceremoniously boot out the most experienced staff that was keeping the ship afloat and expect to replace them with cheap new hires while maintaining productivity, security and revenue (which weren't great at Twitter to begin with), you would have to be delusional.
Some layoffs were likely justified but thanks to the hamfisted way they were done I am sorry for the recruiters that will have to look for new staff now. They will have a very unenviable job.
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want
So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.
He wanted a fresh startup to sink $44 billion into, not an existing business with employees he doesn't want, a legacy product that doesn’t fit his vision, and feature iteration velocity constraints from FTC consent decrees that a new startup wouldn’t have.
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent by virtue of working on some of the most interesting problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous CEOs?
Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time.
I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.
And how do you find "the people carrying the previous culture" and other deadwood?
You have to observe them over several weeks/months. But Elon didn't do this at all. He is about as likely to have fired the best people as the worst people.
>He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational.
But this is my point. By doing it in this order he is risking continued operation of Twitter because he no longer can ensure Twitter can either properly staff business critical teams or retain critical institutional knowledge for how to run the company. He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
Seems like he's trying to speed run employees jumping ship - I'm surprised he didn't try these tactics for a month or two before firing a bunch of people and paying severance.
> He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making
While I think he has done a huge amount to scare away advertisers, I expect the ad industry as a whole is going to be seeing reduced profits for the next couple of years.
Making a bunch of unpopular changes and waiting a month still seems more prudent. The people most likely carrying that culture are gonna be the ones most inclined to leave over changes, and if they are leaving on their own that would decrease costs associated with benefits or the increase to the unemployment tax that comes with layoffs
I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying
Twitter just to destroy it for the lols.
Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis,
trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of
fuck-you money and an axe to grind.
Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision.
Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future of social media does not involve automated moderation and tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn’t a horrible bet.
Musk loves Twitter. You don’t have to point to the billions he spent on it, you can just see that he loves using it. He might want to change it, might destroy it accidentally in the process (like a kid who hugged their beloved pet too hard), but he didn’t set out to destroy it.
I made this comment to a friend recently that I don't think enough people are considering that he might actually be mad enough to have spent $44B to destroy a toxic business.
Is it true that $13bn came in the form of loans and that those loans are secured by Twitter, not Musk or any entity he'd personally be responsible for?
I think his ego is too massive for that. The man bristles at the slightest criticism. Destroying Twitter, even intentionally, will provide enough fodder to his critics that I don't think he'd be able to actually suck it up and follow through.
Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand the scale of his plans for twitter.
At first this was my thinking as well, but then towards the end of the article, the author mentions an "all hands meeting" he had with employees before completing the acquisition, and apparently he said in that occasion that he was against remote work.
Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company.
Changes in terms of employment, like going from WFH to mandatory in-office, makes employees eligible to collect unemployment should they choose to quit. It's one of the few reasons you can collect unemployment after voluntarily quitting.
Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.
This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..."
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an institution or individual they like, but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a crippling social media addiction and an inability to get over his ex.
You are giving Musk too much credit. He’s a classic control freak and micromanager, and right now he’s trying to run twitter like 6 person start-up that running low on funds.
Truth is he probably wanted to eliminate even more staff than he did. It seems like he wants to get the smallest possible team that can keep the core product of twitter running, platform for posting small content blocks.
He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.
This this this. Musk isn't trying to win a popularity contest. He's trying to narrow staff down to that 10% that can do 80% and build back from there. A very cutthroat capitalist approach, but was anyone expecting anything else from the guy who ordered TSLA employees back into factories during covid?
But it s not a neutral decision. It is likely you are left with the employees who are willing to tolerate a worse lifestyle for the paycheck, and you are letting go employees who are smart enough to prefer to have more control of their lives.
I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk to take over.
Musk is his own worst enemy and can be a douche a lot of the time but he doesn't deserve this toxic personal shit for trying to sort out the mess. Also as I remember once he saw past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.
A long standing maneuver that companies have is the "your job is now in Houston" when you live in New York. This has an interesting side effect of basically removing anyone from your company who is old enough to have a family with kids in school, wife working etc. Basically it "legally" removes the older more expensive employees. RTO will remove people also like you said, but I wonder what demographic?
Moving a person's office of employment outside of what would be considered a reasonable commute is treated as a constructive dismissal in the U.S. It is generally legal, because is treated as a normal termination by the employer (basically: the employee's "current" job is being terminated and the employer is offering them a "new" job in a new location).
This means, among other things, that the employee qualifies for unemployment, the employer's unemployment insurance account will get dinged, etc.
If you view every employee as interchangeable this makes sense. Clearly that isn't the case.
What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.
Yes but he may be optimizing for the younger, unmarried with no kids employees he can manage like he wants. Remove remote work and this filters out the types that are less likely to put up with his demands and managerial style, expectations, etc.
why? everyone has PTO, and nobody is required to do all-nighters. If they want to, they can just go on vacation, wait it out and pick up severance when they get the chop.
From a Machiavellian (? I think) perspective, better to do the layoffs first and flood the job market with people before making other unpopular decisions that may drive people away. No idea if that was the plan but it makes sense.
(Even if the number cut doesn't amount to anything market moving, they probably share a lot of the same network, and it will definitely looks like a flood of job seekers in most twitter employees bubbles, and those of their immediate networks)
Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be the less productive fraction of the employees.
To my understanding, he's only laid off teams that he doesn't think are important so far. I know everyone is talking about 50% layoffs, but from what I can see that hasn't actually happened yet, it's only confirmed in the sense that it will happen.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see anything saying that, only teams that have been reduced by ~15% and other teams which have hardly been reduced at all
I know I’m stating the very obvious but this and the layoffs feel quite adversarial.
The vibe I get from Musk is that he doesn’t care about much more than the numbers and believes that a hard dictatorship is warranted in this situation.
The sudden one sided decisions backed by ultimatums give me the impression of lack of respect for his employees and downright abuse.
I don’t see how such a relationship can nurture a positive company culture or retain top talent.
Given that the best people might find new jobs faster than the worst, you might drive away the better half of your human resources. With the 'fire-first' approach, you have more control over who should leave (e.g. hiring managers).
I don't like it either, but I think that is part of the rational behind it.
> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs?
no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers
The layoffs and departures on their own are by my count possibly getting close to saving the company a billion $USD a year. That's the projected cost of the debt obligations he took on buying the company. EZPZ.
Great plan. Now you got rid of all the people with options and you've kept all the deadweight. Many companies do exactly this with voluntary redundancies!
Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: ["emphasized" above]
Elon: Insane potential for improvement
Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>
Jason: Day zero
Jason: Sharpen your blades boys
Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary
departures
Twitter employees: “we’re going to vote to unionize”
When you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn’t you? It brings the federal government in to provide support, on their dime no less. Worst case is everyone leaves, the NLRB finds against Musk, and he has to give folks their jobs back while Twitter is burning.
“The strongest steel is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”
No, you're obviously wrong. Firing people first lets one get rid of the underperformes, while announcing the unpopular decisions first gets rid of the overperformers.
I think you have it backwards. This is how you accomplish a 75% reduction while only having to lay off (and pay severance for) 50%! Musk again playing 4d chess.
No, you have it backwards. If you wanted 75% reduction while only having to lay off 50%, you make the unpopular decision _first_, and then the lay offs.
Forcing people who were told they can work fully remote in their employment agreement to work in the office is treated as a constructive dismissal in the U.S.
As this constructive dismissal is clearly part of the mass layoffs, they would also be subject to the 60 days notice under the WARN Act (or 60 days pay to waive notice).
I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective.
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
IMHO the ideal situation would be for people to work in their own offices, with doors that closed, and short commutes. Easy to work distraction-free alone, easy to have group meetings and random chats.
But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
I don't know how much commercial real estate costs, but in the region around Twitter's HQ it's about $5-$6k for a 1000 square foot apartment
Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile
I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.
And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?
> But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.
The fact is, it was only "100% remote" being forced into existence by the pandemic that is allowing us to even have the debate. Outside of tech almost nowhere allowed remote before.
Musk represents the old guard who liked making people suffer these horrible commutes and office environments just to make senior mgmt feel important.
As a result, I think it's important to defend 100% remote as a pro-employee position, and then look to optional onsite as a way to mitigate potential issues such as isolation, young folks with roomates etc.
I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies.
However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
> In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.
And the fact that Twitter employees aren't all near an office. If you live in Minneapolis, you're not exactly going to be happy that you have to go into the office (closest one is 6+ hours away in Chicago). It's not even a choice to go into the office or not at that point - it's an ultimatum of move immediately for a job where everything is on fire or be fired!
> I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D
I'm beginning to think that collective distributed satellite offices is going to be big. Like WeWork but for companies to house their local staff and far less culty. Would help if they had standing desks, folding treadmills, three screens and everything else for a superb dev experience that is a bit of a pain to set up at home.
I know most studies show remote work improves productivity. I have the opposite experience even though I need to take one hour to commute one way. Our office is 80% empty on average. I think this has greatly hurt the interaction between people, increased friction and slowed down project progress. I am sure some people are more efficient at home, but there might be a silent majority, who enjoy doing less work remotely and never voice themselves (or even say the opposite).
In most places it seems to be the opposite from what I gather from my clients. Small majority of people prefer to go into the office. Especially those with kids. And they are vocal about it.
I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home. However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.
Anything more than 0% office implies a huge sea change from 0%.
To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.
At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.
The problem with hybrid is you're still bound geographically. My work insists on being hybrid (my job has no reason for me to be in the office) and it increases my cost of living by at least 50%, not to mention I'll never be able to be a home owner.
My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United States then people in the highest markets would get significant drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than the average worker doing the same work over the same period of time.
Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I say it".
It's not like your income is scaled to the housing costs though. I just checked craigslist for Los angeles and Columbus, Ohio. 1 bedroom average in LA is $2000 and change, Columbus its $1000. For a year in the average 1 bedroom, you are only paying $12k more or so for the unit in LA. Other costs are about the same, the same MSRP for consumer goods, about the same grocery bill (certain food is honestly very cheap in LA due to its year round availability), about the same $10 pints of beers and $12 entrees at your typical late 20s and up drinking/eating establishment.
Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.
Rest of the world has largely gone back to office to work now, even if it is part time.
I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.
For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.
My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.
I’m definitely at the point where I’m getting less productive from home, but the question is when is that drop in productivity offset by the time wasted commuting? If my office was just down the street I’d be there every day.
This comment really strikes a chord with me. Some days, I’m way more productive, others not so much.
What I do love is eliminating the commute time. That is time I’ve been able to utilize in other ways that really contribute to my mental well being.
Walking the kids to school (instead of driving), walking the dog, exercise, catch up on chores or errands, etc.
That is probably my favorite aspect of working from home.
I do miss those serendipitous interactions with coworkers. And Zoom fatigue is real. (I’m just waiting for the day when Zoom alerts your manager that the Zoom window is not the active window on your machine)
Wouldn't you experience in-person meeting fatigue sooner than zoom fatigue? What is it about sitting in the comfort of your own home having a conversation that is worse than sitting in an office having a conversation?
> I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective
Even if productivity was down at home vs at the office aren't we already way too productive anyways ?
Living in the office would also be more productive, and working 10 hours per day, banning weekends, &c.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're here to grind for 45 years to pay the lifestyle of eccentrics like Musk or to live life ? If it's ok to lose 10% of productivity while regaining hours of your life ?
I secretly agree with you. I think the ideal situation is to accommodate both sets of needs. Personally I prefer 100% remote but if someone wants hybrid then that's fine too.
I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate because I acknowledge that executives really would like everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself than do that.
So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other billionaires on the other side of the country.
And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason.
What an absolute knob.
Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.
It's an interesting look from someone claiming to believe that climate change is one of the biggest threats to humanity. Better get those expensive developers working from the office again so they keep buying expensive electric cars...
Isn't the Hyperloop regularly derided by those in the environmental community for distracting from more useful/environmentally sustainable transit solutions. Tesla also bifurcated the charger ports on the market, which has slowed adoption of EV chargers by businesses. Definitely a more complicated relationship than a surface level analysis would imply
Let's not pretend his goal was to sell more cars; that's ridiculous.
But to your point, he's always seemed to have this philosophy that climate mitigation doesn't have to be a compromise. In his vision of the future we do all the things we do now and more, but we do them better.
I saw a stat recently that an electric car removes about as much emissions as a meter of road adds.
Electric cars are the most overblown response to climate change. They will help in a myopic way when comparing directly to combustion cars over several years (electric cars only start to save emissions somewhere between them being driven 6-24 months into their ownership), but I doubt it's much more than that and even possibly a net increase in emissions in terms of furthering the dominance of the car.
Elon Musk doesn't care about anything other than his ego.
I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending. Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a workaholic.
Showing up late to an all-hands meeting of thousands of employees is wasting thousands of hours of peoples' time. I don't care how important you think his time is that's not going to add up to a rational choice
"On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The Times.
The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer. Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.
Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.
"Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned."
This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of "free".
Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be commercialised.
Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more fantasy than reality.
> The agency said that it was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and that it was prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with certain privacy and security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse.
> Twitter was first put under a consent order in 2011 and it agreed to a new order earlier this year. If the FTC finds Twitter is not complying with that order, it could fine the company hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially damaging the company’s already precarious financial state.
> ... The new decree required Twitter to start enhanced privacy and security programs, which were to be audited by a third party. Under that decree, Twitter is required to conduct a privacy assessment of any new products it launches.
> ... The meltdown of the security leadership is especially fraught because an FTC audit was expected by January, according to two people familiar with the schedule. One said that Kissner and other executives had been hiring, despite a company-wide freeze, in a frantic effort to meet compliance rules before then.
The timing of this is the content - not the ending of remote work issue. It's using the news cycle and a hot button issue (end remote work) to bury the regulatory liability of the headline of the 3 chief complaince officers resignation the day before a FTC complaince filing.
Yeah this is Musk 101. My favorite one was the day before a massive whistleblower article came out about Tesla he literally released a Tesla Cyberwhistle. "BLOW THE WHISTLE" he said. Afterwards all searches for Tesla whistleblower were articles about this tiny piece of metal he put up for sale in his shop. Genius.
it's almost like the headline that was buried about Twitter and Facebook colluding with Biden's DHS to "police disinformation", where social media companies were shills for government propaganda
> the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was:
1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).
2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.
With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.
With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.
I wonder if you've read Turn the Ship Around [1]? It's one of my favorite leadership books and tells the true story of the Navy captain who was put in the awkward position of running a submarine class that he was not familiar with.
He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you describe in type 1.
Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.
If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you notice he's writing books for a living now.
When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over again was to live with it through a few seasons before making any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up to, where the best views are.
It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.
Good advice about the seasons. Sounds like "Chesterton's Fence":
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [the fence] and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?
When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?
> Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?
There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be run with some discretion.
Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said "ok".
> When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well,
Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good while.
> does each ship have its own culture?
Yes, undoubtedly.
> How do they coordinate?
Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc.
But seriously, we have some standards for operations that make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more to coalesce those ships into a unit.
Military aircraft carriers are going to operate in a manner completely different from boats carrying skipping containers, if we're going with this analogy. The number of social media companies Musk had any experience running prior to buying Twitter is 0.
You are assuming that he is optimizing for employee happiness. I am not associating a value judgement to whether that is the right/wrong move in Twitter's context.
I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon Musk might do to Twitter next.
It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to think that they won't barring some exceptions.
I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at seeing these social media empires being toppled.
The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.
Actual happiness was not the point. In the Navy, the CO doesn't have to care about employee happiness, anyways, while Musk sort of does. 'Happiness' was a rhetorical device I used there.
Elon's the #1 type there. He's been shown to be talking to a lot of people at Twitter to get a good understanding of how the product and company works and removing people as he finds it being unrelated to the future success of the company.
> this seems to be a significant problem to your CO analogy.
So let me ask you… how does a ship’s commanding officer not have more skin in the game? A rich person loses their second home or yacht when things go south… a person on a ship can hit the brig or lose their life.
Whether or not they literally own the place is aside from the posters point about new leaders coming in and automatically upending everything without taking the time to actually listen to people and learn what actually is and isn't working. But yeah, it's an ironic choice of words.
The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.
Your entire reasoning behind your comment indicates you don't understand this point I'm making about leadership. You're talking about a "new plan" as if we all agreed that Twitter was doing so badly that it needed a 180. You use "dissidents" and "better team" as if it's a fact that things are so bad and the team is so inept that Elon could do nothing but burn the place to the ground and make a phoenix from the ashes.
My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's current head, it's a massive organism and if you make systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium steps that are well-thought-out, over time.
God how can I downvote this. Did you even read what the OP said? So in this case the "dissidents" are people that appreciate incremental change, like their opinions to be valued in their respective field of expertise, and possibly appreciate being able to work from home?
Thank goodness COs can operate entire ships by themselves, otherwise they'd probably need some tact and grace to get the ship to its destination safely.
The only thing that ever happens on these scenarios, are that the skilled folks who are concerned about losing their jobs will move and Twitter will be left with the dregs who stay because they can't get a new job elsewhere.
Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor, this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The ship needs to do something new, and this is something new, but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.
A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Whether or not you agree with those measures, well you don't have $44b on the line. Of all of Elon's businesses, this one is probably the most in his wheelhouse. He's a web guy after all.
I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways, but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.
Difference is you served (or are serving) during peacetime. This is wartime..
Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.
Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter) which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt
The Navy doesn't differentiate between wartime and peacetime for training or operations, generally. The difference would lie in what type of ordnance we used (real during wartime, inert during peace) and the measures we operated under at sea (we'd emit less signals and dog the hatches).
Also, in wartime, it's actually even more important that a new CO didn't upset the delicate balance or change procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be deadly.
Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make assumptions.
Seeing someone who served in the Navy being told that their peacetime service is very different from the war that Twitter is currently experiencing is... I'm not even sure how to react to that. Lots of execs like to stretch those military metaphors -- they're all in the trenches, all hands on deck, take no prisoners and all that -- but I think you may have stretched this one way past its breaking point.
Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers".
I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.
Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created? I’ve seen no upside to employees offered, only brutal management and benefit reduction with a promise of hard work for less.
> What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?
They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine.
Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.
They launched the predecessor to the current hottest social media app but killed it before it could gain any popularity. So that’s a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.
Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.
> an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi
Could you give me an example from the USA?
> your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near]
The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.
> Twitter does content moderation.
Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts.
To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.
Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?
I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to pay that well...
>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.
> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"
This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?
Reading generously, I would say you could interpret that statement more like: "Now that we know it is possible to innovate with an asynchronous workforce, and most people want to work that way, it will be extremely difficult for us to gather the same quality of individuals in one place to innovate if we decide we need their butts to be in seats."
Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals figured out how to game equity compensation with their Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have had some big leaps).
A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.
>What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place.
Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.
Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.
the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.
> Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate.
The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.
>It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient.
Is it though?
Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.
I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
Readit News
The problem with this method is that many people DID relocate to keep their jobs. And then were layed off two months later.
Imagine uplifting your life for your job, and then being told you need to find a new job anyway.
At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying despite covid they made a profit.
Companies lie to employees all the time.
And let's be honest, Musk isn't doing it in this order for the wellbeing of Twitter's employees.
But at least you could avoid some of the "unregretted attrition" of people you decided to keep.
(This assumes Musk isn't intentionally sequencing things to limit the "official" size of the layoff while actually wanting to cut a significantly larger percentage.)
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.
Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many people are going to think twice about signing up to work for a company and owner that have a reputation for treating people as disposable trash.
Employees are the company's most valuable capital - so if you unceremoniously boot out the most experienced staff that was keeping the ship afloat and expect to replace them with cheap new hires while maintaining productivity, security and revenue (which weren't great at Twitter to begin with), you would have to be delusional.
Some layoffs were likely justified but thanks to the hamfisted way they were done I am sorry for the recruiters that will have to look for new staff now. They will have a very unenviable job.
So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.
He wanted a fresh startup to sink $44 billion into, not an existing business with employees he doesn't want, a legacy product that doesn’t fit his vision, and feature iteration velocity constraints from FTC consent decrees that a new startup wouldn’t have.
Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent by virtue of working on some of the most interesting problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous CEOs?
I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.
You have to observe them over several weeks/months. But Elon didn't do this at all. He is about as likely to have fired the best people as the worst people.
But this is my point. By doing it in this order he is risking continued operation of Twitter because he no longer can ensure Twitter can either properly staff business critical teams or retain critical institutional knowledge for how to run the company. He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
You know what we call a vehicle thats undergoing Rapid Disassembly? An Explosion.
While I think he has done a huge amount to scare away advertisers, I expect the ad industry as a whole is going to be seeing reduced profits for the next couple of years.
That's a bold assumption -- that there is a vision
Really? I was under the impression that Twitter was hemorrhaging money.
Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.
Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future of social media does not involve automated moderation and tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn’t a horrible bet.
If so, how does that work?
Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company.
[1] i.e. almost guaranteed
Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.
Musk is his own worst enemy and can be a douche a lot of the time but he doesn't deserve this toxic personal shit for trying to sort out the mess. Also as I remember once he saw past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.
This means, among other things, that the employee qualifies for unemployment, the employer's unemployment insurance account will get dinged, etc.
What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.
(Even if the number cut doesn't amount to anything market moving, they probably share a lot of the same network, and it will definitely looks like a flood of job seekers in most twitter employees bubbles, and those of their immediate networks)
I'm happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see anything saying that, only teams that have been reduced by ~15% and other teams which have hardly been reduced at all
The vibe I get from Musk is that he doesn’t care about much more than the numbers and believes that a hard dictatorship is warranted in this situation.
The sudden one sided decisions backed by ultimatums give me the impression of lack of respect for his employees and downright abuse.
I don’t see how such a relationship can nurture a positive company culture or retain top talent.
I don't like it either, but I think that is part of the rational behind it.
> Day zero
> Sharpen your blades boys
> 2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary departures
[1] https://muskmessages.com/d/34.html
no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers
Deleted Comment
Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: ["emphasized" above]
Elon: Insane potential for improvement
Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>
Jason: Day zero
Jason: Sharpen your blades boys
Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures
Jason: https://twitter.com/jason/status/1515094823337832448?s=1O&t=...
Jason: I mean, the product road map is beyond obviously
Jason: Premium feature abound ... and twitter blue has exactly zero [unknown emoji]
Jason: What committee came up with the list of dog shit features in Blue?!? It's worth paying to turn it off
Elon: Yeah, what an insane piece of shit!
Jason: Maybe we don't talk twitter on twitter OM @
Elon: Was just thinking that haha
When you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn’t you? It brings the federal government in to provide support, on their dime no less. Worst case is everyone leaves, the NLRB finds against Musk, and he has to give folks their jobs back while Twitter is burning.
“The strongest steel is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”
Page 20
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
As this constructive dismissal is clearly part of the mass layoffs, they would also be subject to the 60 days notice under the WARN Act (or 60 days pay to waive notice).
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile
I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.
And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?
I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.
I also can only assume that it plays a role in office real-estate costs too, just like it does on housing costs.
And all the evidence agrees. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-unintended-consequences...
Musk represents the old guard who liked making people suffer these horrible commutes and office environments just to make senior mgmt feel important.
As a result, I think it's important to defend 100% remote as a pro-employee position, and then look to optional onsite as a way to mitigate potential issues such as isolation, young folks with roomates etc.
However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
> He calls himself a "nano-manager".
source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-pioneer-elon-musk-...
> In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-extreme-...
> Elon Musk says remote workers are just pretending to work.
source: https://fortune.com/2022/07/20/elon-musk-remote-work-from-ho...
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D
Highest impact is mid project. You know, to make it hurt.
Dead Comment
I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home. However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.
To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.
At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.
Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I say it".
Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.
I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.
For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.
My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.
What I do love is eliminating the commute time. That is time I’ve been able to utilize in other ways that really contribute to my mental well being.
Walking the kids to school (instead of driving), walking the dog, exercise, catch up on chores or errands, etc.
That is probably my favorite aspect of working from home.
I do miss those serendipitous interactions with coworkers. And Zoom fatigue is real. (I’m just waiting for the day when Zoom alerts your manager that the Zoom window is not the active window on your machine)
Wouldn't you experience in-person meeting fatigue sooner than zoom fatigue? What is it about sitting in the comfort of your own home having a conversation that is worse than sitting in an office having a conversation?
Even if productivity was down at home vs at the office aren't we already way too productive anyways ?
Living in the office would also be more productive, and working 10 hours per day, banning weekends, &c.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're here to grind for 45 years to pay the lifestyle of eccentrics like Musk or to live life ? If it's ok to lose 10% of productivity while regaining hours of your life ?
I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate because I acknowledge that executives really would like everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself than do that.
And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason.
What an absolute knob.
Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.
But to your point, he's always seemed to have this philosophy that climate mitigation doesn't have to be a compromise. In his vision of the future we do all the things we do now and more, but we do them better.
Electric cars are the most overblown response to climate change. They will help in a myopic way when comparing directly to combustion cars over several years (electric cars only start to save emissions somewhere between them being driven 6-24 months into their ownership), but I doubt it's much more than that and even possibly a net increase in emissions in terms of furthering the dominance of the car.
Elon Musk doesn't care about anything other than his ego.
I guess that would depend on whether they'd be getting employee comp/equity, or Elon's comp/equity.
"On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The Times.
The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer. Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.
Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.
"Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/elon-musk-twit...
This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of "free".
Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be commercialised.
Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more fantasy than reality.
> The agency said that it was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and that it was prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with certain privacy and security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse.
> Twitter was first put under a consent order in 2011 and it agreed to a new order earlier this year. If the FTC finds Twitter is not complying with that order, it could fine the company hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially damaging the company’s already precarious financial state.
> ... The new decree required Twitter to start enhanced privacy and security programs, which were to be audited by a third party. Under that decree, Twitter is required to conduct a privacy assessment of any new products it launches.
> ... The meltdown of the security leadership is especially fraught because an FTC audit was expected by January, according to two people familiar with the schedule. One said that Kissner and other executives had been hiring, despite a company-wide freeze, in a frantic effort to meet compliance rules before then.
Dead Comment
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/twitter-ciso-resigns/...
> the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
You act like it's not a big problem that social media platforms are constantly exploited by bad actors spreading disinformation at scale.
1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).
2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.
With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.
With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.
He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you describe in type 1.
[1] https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/
If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you notice he's writing books for a living now.
It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.
To be fair, he actually does own the place.
Deleted Comment
When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?
There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be run with some discretion.
Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said "ok".
> When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well,
Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good while.
> does each ship have its own culture?
Yes, undoubtedly.
> How do they coordinate?
Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc.
But seriously, we have some standards for operations that make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more to coalesce those ships into a unit.
I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon Musk might do to Twitter next.
It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to think that they won't barring some exceptions.
The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.
this is the $44B problem to your CO analogy.
Skin in the game. The world runs far better on it.
I see you edited your comment from the original:
> this seems to be a significant problem to your CO analogy.
So let me ask you… how does a ship’s commanding officer not have more skin in the game? A rich person loses their second home or yacht when things go south… a person on a ship can hit the brig or lose their life.
In fact a CO might be in better position in that regard. Soldiers don’t quit as fast as devs.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is 2)
My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's current head, it's a massive organism and if you make systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium steps that are well-thought-out, over time.
I mean, if you ask any commanders in group 2, they're going to all say that.
That’s not a difference at all, as it would be exactly what (2) were thinking of their new commands as well.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Of course he is.
Was it that before Musk actually decided to buy it? Because as far as I can tell, the ad dollars started dropping after his announcement.
Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.
Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter) which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt
Also, in wartime, it's actually even more important that a new CO didn't upset the delicate balance or change procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be deadly.
Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make assumptions.
Whatever state Twitter was in before Musk entered with a white knight syndrome, it was in a better state than it is now.
> Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.
Well, that was his first mistake at Twitter before he even "owned" it.
Deleted Comment
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers".
I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.
They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine.
Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.
Bootstrap
Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.
Could you give me an example from the USA?
> your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near]
The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.
> Twitter does content moderation.
Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts.
To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.
Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.
This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?
Because 3 years ago people thought it wouldn't work. The pandemic showed it does.
Isn’t the word “nobody” literally a superlative?
what is this statement based on?
Seems to me that the majority was innovating just fine this way until pandemic hit.
A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.
The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place.
Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.
Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.
I like remote work too, but there's been plenty of innovation pre-pandemic when we (almost) all had our butt in a seat
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15903849198299627...
That doesn't seem compatible with what you present in your post.
It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate.
The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.
Is it though?
Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.
I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.