The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down

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Trusty said:
Twitter and Facebook are not the same. They are both social media companies but they do not provide the same services. Its as simple as that.


I don't see it. Maybe you are using Twitter wrong. The accounts i follow for FinTwit are extremely useful.



I only see it when i go on to a page talking politics. It's a cesspit, but i stay away from it. Financial Twitter which i use it for is perfectly pleasant, people disagree but they don't throw mud like the people involved in tribal politics do.

When i've strayed into other arenas like classic cars or something, its the same, its fine, perfectly pleasant. It's just like this forum really, 90% of it people getting along, its on some threads in GD and speakers corners that seem to bring out the worst in humanity. But perhaps that is a reflection on us rather than the tool
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Yes, it's very tribal in there like they've taken blood oaths. There's no in between in there.
 
Colonel_Klinck said:
Welcome to 2022. That is the world we live in now and politicians are fanning the flames of division because it works. They don't need everyone to vote for them, they just need more than the other candidate.
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I have yet to come upon a voting system for political leaders, even outside of a democracy where a winner has to receive a full 100% of the votes, where is this remarkable system enacted?
 
That's how redundancy happens in the USA ... accompanied to your desk on the day, .... and, with (potential?) UK withdrawal for EU labour laws
 
Colonel_Klinck said:
Seems firing half the workforce without 60 days notice in California is a no no and will leave Twitter on the hook for $500 fine a day per person + still have to pay their salary + still have to give them medical benefits. He would have been better off giving them 60 days notice and getting 60 days work out of them. Its not like he hasn't closed California offices before, he will know this and so will Twitter lawyers.

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I mean give the lad some credit. He isn't that stupid that he thinks he doesn't have to do this. He'll simply pay them 60 days notice. It isn't like folk working notice do much valuable work in any case...
 
Colonel_Klinck said:
Its not like he hasn't closed California offices before, he will know this and so will Twitter lawyers.

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Wouldn't he just stick them on gardening leave in that case? I mean that's sometimes the approach in the UK... fire them but technically it doesn't kick in until the end of the required notice period.

Unless of course, it's cheaper to pay the fines than pay the average employee during that period? (edit - and it certainly doesn't look to be cheaper to do that)

All you need to do surely is just say; "hey here's notice that you're being let go in 60 days but you may have noticed your login and building pass were already shut down this morning, we don't actually need you to come in anymore, thanks."

If he's just sacked people in say London with no notice/paid gardening leave in lieu of notice then, just LOL, obvious employment tribunal case for those employees.
 
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StriderX said:
Would be funny if he's sacked people in multiple jurisdictions with different punitive penalties for dismissal without warning.
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He might have done so but that Twitter thread is likely also a bit of blatant self-promotion and touting for business for that lawyer, at the moment there hasn't been any confirmation that they've been sacking people without paying them 60 days of severance/gardening leave, it's more an "if he does this then..." thread.
 
dowie said:
Wouldn't he just stick them on gardening leave in that case? I mean that's sometimes the approach in the UK... fire them but technically it doesn't kick in until the end of the required notice period.

Unless of course, it's cheaper to pay the fines than pay the average employee during that period? (edit - and it certainly doesn't look to be cheaper to do that)

All you need to do surely is just say; "hey here's notice that you're being let go in 60 days but you may have noticed your login and building pass were already shut down this morning, we don't actually need you to come in anymore, thanks."

If he's just sacked people in say London with no notice/paid gardening leave in lieu of notice then, just LOL, obvious employment tribunal case for those employees.
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Yep, in IT you don't usually work your notice and are placed on gardening leave because of security.
 
Chris Wilson said:
Conversely it could be said that it concentrates the minds of the remaining workforce :)
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Mainly on looking for a new job with a boss who understands something about the business and isn't an utterly impulsive idiot.

Given he's now expecting a lot of the workforce to do 80+ hours a week I'd not be surprised if he ends up with only those with no other choice left, whilst those who can transfer their skills to other jobs, even ones that may be less well paid (but potentially have a much better effective pay per hour).

I suspect in about 6 months there is going to be a quiet attempt by Twitter to try and get a lot of the talent he's thrown away back as the management at that point tries to recover from the damage Musk has done in his first couple of week.

I was seeing something about he's also trying to get Twitter to find a billion a year in savings in things like servers and cloud services which suggests to me that we're likely to see a lot more, and longer spells where twitter is down in various countries as most companies don't tend to have massive amounts of "excess" capacity unless it's core to their business and needed to cover problem (I imagine he's looked at the fact twitter will have a bunch of "redundant" capacity in data centres and ordered them to get rid of some without looking/listening to the reasons why you have might have a good fraction of your total server capacity spare and spread out geographically).
 
Werewolf said:
Mainly on looking for a new job with a boss who understands something about the business and isn't an utterly impulsive idiot.

Given he's now expecting a lot of the workforce to do 80+ hours a week I'd not be surprised if he ends up with only those with no other choice left, whilst those who can transfer their skills to other jobs, even ones that may be less well paid (but potentially have a much better effective pay per hour).

I suspect in about 6 months there is going to be a quiet attempt by Twitter to try and get a lot of the talent he's thrown away back as the management at that point tries to recover from the damage Musk has done in his first couple of week.

I was seeing something about he's also trying to get Twitter to find a billion a year in savings in things like servers and cloud services which suggests to me that we're likely to see a lot more, and longer spells where twitter is down in various countries as most companies don't tend to have massive amounts of "excess" capacity unless it's core to their business and needed to cover problem (I imagine he's looked at the fact twitter will have a bunch of "redundant" capacity in data centres and ordered them to get rid of some without looking/listening to the reasons why you have might have a good fraction of your total server capacity spare and spread out geographically).
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I somewhat agree but Twitter is at the end of the day, a basic web application. Reddit for example only has 700 employees. The folk he wants to attract are those that want to do 80 hours a week. They want to point to a global mass market product and say "I implemented that". It is playing on the ego of high-end silicone valley devs.

And tbh, anyone that doesn't want that is exactly as you said - free to jump ship.
 
Chris Wilson said:
Conversely it could be said that it concentrates the minds of the remaining workforce :)
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Maybe but it can cause a lot of damage, this 50% thing has come from a "report" according to various articles, I've not actually seen anything official but it may well be true.

Either way, if he's slashing some % of jobs then he probably does want to get some certainty communicated to the workforce pretty quickly (or at least the parts he definitely wants to retain). I'm not sure he's in a good position to know who is very useful (yet) so getting rid of 50% is very risky, though if the intention is to slash 50% then getting it out of the way quickly might be better than dragging it out, there are higher order effects with this stuff - if you leave a bunch of people with uncertainty hanging over them then they're going to start leaving at random, in fact with a bias towards the very people you perhaps want to keep as your top engineers probably have regular offers from recruiters for *good* positions (everyone no doubt has regular offers from recruiters but those offers aren't or at least weren't necessarily going to be as attractive as their Twitter jobs). An even bigger issue is if some senior engineer takes a whole team with him/her to some other large tech firm.

Generally, no one is ever irreplaceable but some people will be a blow to lose and losing an entire team can be a very big blow.
 
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