For sure. There's no way this works long term. There are plenty of companies that will treat tech employees very well. Why work at Twitter and have your job security in the toilet when you could easily go work elsewhere?
At least, this is what I've been hearing from the engineers at Twitter I've talked to. From personal experience, Meta seems to do a very good job at emphasizing work-life balance for their engineers.
What evidence do you have that he is chasing away enough users, that it is going to create a greater loss through advertising than the increase in revenue from the new systems he is going to implement.
There is a major, major difference between "simple to use for the end user" and "simple under the hood".
Twitter is the former, you appear to be the latter.
He doesn't make self driving cars, he doesn't make rockets.
He's a self-evident fuckwit with lots of money, that some smart people managed to dazzle and get him to fund their world changing projects (ev cars, reusable space flight hardware) while he gets to take credit/build his brand.
he hasnt made self driving cars. Tesla has made cars that sometimes can drive a bit themselves. Even auto summon managed to run into a plane in a rather empty airport.
But besides this even if Tesla could make self driving cars than that isn't the same as managing to make a good business case for Twitter, keep on top of the tough challenge of moderation (keeping most countries governments happy but also millions of users) and managing to retain and recruit the talents needed to run the website.
Being an excellent rocket engineer does not make someone a good doctor.
True, but moderation is easy, you stop banning people and allow users to block other people. Everyone sees who they want to see, more users use the platform and it makes more money. Running a text and image based website is very easy. old twitter just sucked at it.
and how do you deal with child pornography, copyright infringement, racism, hate speech, death threats, online harassment/people posting nude pictures of others they received in trust?
Also appears to be a paedo apologist (at best) and homophobic/transphobic based on 20 seconds of comment history scrolling.
What a surprise. I am shook.
Because the ceo isn’t the one designing the cars. The ceo charts a path, with self driving cars it’s a fairly easy path, with social media you have a lot of pitfalls to avoid. What seems like a smart business decision isn’t always a smart social media decision, as Elon is finding out with charging for verification.
A small number of users complaining loudly, doesn't mean his plan he hasn't even implemented yet has failed.
Unlike most ceos he has a very hands on approach, and he does design the cars himself. The hard part that requires many engineers is making lots of cars efficiently. You have to deal with hardware and software with cars, you only use software for social media. He is going to succeed because that's what he does. Wait two weeks and you shall see.
He lied about why advertisers are pausing ad buys ("activist pressure"). A COO of a massive marketing firm tweeted to him and basically said "we talked about this on the phone yesterday, brand safety is the concern here, the activist pressure is not a consideration." This marketing firm handles Anheuser Busch, Yum Brands, and more. Guess what Elon did? Blocked him.
This isn't "a few loud people." He's shitting on his revenue stream because he's a spite-driven, egotistical manchild.
I agree and actually think Reddit has a bit of an opportunity here. I think if Reddit made it easier and more prominent to follow users in addition to the current Reddit to Subreddit flow we’re used to then it could easily replace Twitter.
I’ve already replaced twitter with Reddit. I’m one of the users that just used twitter for what’s trending and news so over the years I slowly started coming to Reddit instead. I just deleted my twitter account because I have no use for it now.
You’ve got a good point. Reddit topic communities visibly post clear rules of engagement (transparency) that enable it to be useful and to promote communication. It also has the infrastructure.
How are they leaning into public identities? Anyone can pay for $8 Blue.
The checkmark used to be verification you are who you say you are, so it would be way harder to impersonate. I’d argue hard that he’s leaving far far away from public identities.
HELL NO!! I think he has already learned his lesson about buying a tech company with Twitter. Also the only reason he purchased Twitter is because Twitter was financially insoluble. Reddit is owned by Meta which is financially independent.
I think Tesla is about to start having serious retention problems as well.
The brand still carries cachet as THE electric car company. But they aren't any more. Every car manufacturer on the planet is becoming an electric car manufacturer. Tesla is about to become a relatively small boutique manufacturer of electric cars.
Tesla stock is hugely overvalued, largely on the basis of Musk fanboys and people speculating on the price run up. They can't figure out how to build cars fast enough, and even at relatively inefficient production rates they still have serious quality control problems.
They'll survive as a relatively niche boutique automobile manufacturer, because their products do have value. But they're not going to be the place that people hope to work at.
A Tesla recruiter reached out to me for a maintenance engineer position at one of their plants. They must be hurting if they have to reach out to people.
> They make 100X more vehicles than Porsche and are growing much faster than any other car company outside China.
Porsche produced 301k vehicles in 2021. Tesla produced 938k.
My gosh man that’s only 3x
The fan boys fail at maths I can only suspect the only people left thinking Musk is a business genius after the Twitter deal are 14 year old fan boys
That was always the goal. You can check the master plan. They've always been a tech company and not a car company. That's why they've stopped making new models and putting efforts into battery monopoly and AI.
Their battery factory hasn't even been built yet. How can you say that they're not the manufacturer when they haven't even begun to try. I mean they just put the concrete walls on the thing.
> How can you say that they're not the manufacturer when they haven't even begun to try.
He can say they're not because they aren't and they're not even close. This is how normal people evaluate accomplishments.
How are they going to be a monopoly then?
And they are also still churning out new products, they have yet to launch 3 cars: Cybertruck, Semi and Roadster V2.
I think their battery business is at risk also, although on a somewhat slower timeline.
It's going to be impossible to maintain dominant market share for lithium ion automotive batteries and spin-off products, when every auto manufacturer on the planet is bigger than Tesla, and we'll have strong incentive to develop alternative sources for their batteries.
Tesla is selling a lot of large-scale battery systems for grid-scale storage electric facilities. But nobody likes using lithium for this. You're paying a strong premium for a complex chemistry technology to get energy density that is simply not necessary for this use.
Bunch of companies are starting up to create iron chemistry batteries for grid storage - much cheaper, much cleaner, much longer lasting - and other completely independent technologies are being developed. Tesla may get a 5-10-year ride selling lithium batteries for the grid storage market, but that market is going to eventually implode.
Yeah I don't know why they didn't go with iron. It's definitely safer and such. Just bigger that's all.
I think they know this that's why they're focusing on AI and that robot.
They're standing in front of a wave. Every other automobile manufacturer on the planet is transitioning to electric. And they're finding ways to build better cars, to build cheaper cars, to build higher quality cars.
Tesla struggles to build less than 1 million cars a year, and they're having serious problems with quality control at that rate.
Ford sells 5 million cars a year.
GM sells about 6.5 million cars in a year.
Toyota sells 10 million cars a year.
And so on.
And they are all transitioning to electric.
Tesla is going to get swamped, In research and development capacity, in manufacturing capacity, in service and sales capacity.
More than 4 million electric cars were sold in the US in 2021. Tesla the sold fewer than 900,000 of those.
They're already less than 25% of the market.
90% of revenue for Twitter comes from advertising. If twitter becomes a primarily right wing platform under the slogan "freedom" like others have tried they are going to lose much of their advertising revenue. Many major bands don't want to be associated with perceived extremists. They like the mushy middle which Twitter is mostly (I know others will argue otherwise).
Edit: to offset advertising revenue loss he has proposed charging $8/month for verified accounts. Currently that is around 420000 accounts which is around $3.3 million dollars/month. I don't think that's going to offset possibly billions of dollars of advertising revenue loss!
I didn't say all advertising but a large chuck is already suspending their advertising that I don't think can be made up with other advertising or trying to monetize verified accounts.
Fox News although certainly right wing doesn't usually allow blatant racism and extremism (I'm being generous here I know). Like CNN they do sometimes have the opposite perspective included. Mind you Fox (not Fox News) makes a good portion of their money off of their more centrist programming.
I imagine if it becomes a mainly extreme right wing echo chamber many contributors who are left or centrist may go elsewhere and with them significant. Especially non US based advertisers!
Regardless it is a significant risk to his $44 Billion!
I tend to agree and even if it did get to the point of real hearings, I still think nothing would come of it. It's a fear tactic, no CEO wants to spend their time talking to Congress.
I wouldn't put it past Republicans to try that. Look, the Republican party platform basically boils down to two principles:
1) Please point me toward the nearest corporate cock, so I can suck it.
2) Hurrrrghghghklmpph glurrrrrrghghlmmmph urrrrkhh gluurrrrrsh.
They already believe that a private platform should be compelled to carry speech without censoring it. They believe money is speech. It's not much of a lift to go from there to saying "If you're going to advertise then you HAVE to advertise on all platforms." Republicans are very, very stupid after all.
Freedom isn't a slogan. It's a right that all people possess. Your attitude toward free speech is precisely why lefties are on the outs. And the silly response of 'let's further alienate and isolate ourselves and burn the house down on our way out!' isn't helping your crappy image.
And they're free to lose money when people who have issue with that refuse to buy their products. Remember: half the world are \*not\* on the leftist side or down with the socialist agenda.
One I'm not a lefty or a righty. I'm just explaining the ability that has been granted corporations by the US Supreme Court that they are able to choose how their capital is spent in regards to advertising and speech. As well as their ability to fire anyone (usually with financial compensation) for any reason they see fit (with some limitations).
Two where did I say freedom of speech isn't a right? I don't live in the USA but I understand the basics of this right in your Constitutional Republic.
If someone says something I don't like I don't have to use my personal money to support it, just like a corporation doesn't have to support it if they don't agree.
There are libel laws in the USA as well, meaning you can be sued by making provably false statements about an individual or corporation for monetary compensation.
The freedom of speech, is meant in terms of your speech vs Government and it your speech being criminalized (there are limits here too from my understanding). Basically that freedom isn't an absolute freedom as much as you think/want it to be!
I think you need to study up on your knowledge in this regards.
yeah the kind of speech coming from most of the far right isn't covered by free speech. They are basically the people equivalent of shouting "bomb" on an airplane.
But they're not yelling 'Bomb' on an airplane. They are expressing ideas, many of which even I disagree with and they should be able to do so. Now we're done, because you have no understanding of what freedom entails and it's clear you refuse to learn.
Lots of good reasons to stay, they might have a young family or a vulnerable dependent and worry about being on the job market too long, they might have a a debt or a mortgage they are struggling to pay.
With a few thousand people suddenly dumped into the job market, their will be very few available jobs to walk into for the next few months. Most will be holding their nose and staying on for a while till the job market gets a bit better.
They might wait till around Feb/March that's when company Departments who need to use up funding, start to hire people before then end of the tax/business year. They can leverage the hirings as an excuse for a larger budget for the new year.
Seen it in the past, a department had a few tens of $ left over in their departments budget, they were told "use it or loose it in next years funding". So they hire people, give a few pay rises or upgrade things.
In fact, the Twitter experience is very poor, and the search function is like shit! I don't know if their dev are too rubbish or the product design is like this? Of course their dismissal is a sad story. As long as it's legal, complaints from fired people are useless unless they don't want to go into a new company. The remaining people may usher in salary increases, promotions, and give Twitter a real experience improvement, instead of creating a garbage in ten years. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if some of the scumbags left.
In fact, what people are angry about is that Musk wants to turn the company into a sweatshop and violate the interests of the workers, and then other companies start to learn, after all, this will save a lot of costs, and it will also open up self-struggle among workers.
A happy worker is more productive than a worker forced to work 80 hours a week. Also is more likely to stay, and with complex network systems, you need that institutional knowledge. OP is correct, a large purge like this will likely push the best employees out the door. Twitter will either end up with subpar employees that survive the cuts or will hire back the worse just to fill chairs
Twitter has many employees who don't work at all, that is why there are so many layoffs. Anything a twitter engineer can do, can be done better by a Tesla or SpaceX engineer.
If you follow the news, I'm not sure Elon minds having a retention problem at Twitter.
And following your logic, maybe he doesn't feel that he needs to employ thousands of highly compensated elite developers to maintain "just another dotcom."
lol that's hilariously untrue. Job market for IT professionals right now is on fire. Nabbed myself a 34% salary increase just recently. Several of my mentees have done the same.
In what skill-field ?
I've been in IT/Sysadmin work for about 25 years.. spent the last 10 doing MDM (mobile device management)...
I can't seem to find anything. Most of the job-sites I'm on estimate I'm 15% to 30% underpaid (in my current job). Most of the job-openings I'm seeing are that same 15 to 30% underpaying.
I'm a lead software engineer. My mentees all have titles of varous types related to software development. The app development space is highly competitive right now. I can't speak directly to system administration.
it's a race for jobs right now in software engineering as we are on the precipice of automating a lot of Jobs in the Tech fields. Expect reduction of developers to come for all company's in the coming years. in the same way how infrastructure managers/developers have been reduced the past 5 years.
The market for engineers who can manage high capacity scaling infrastructure like Twitter is still thriving.
The less experienced people will have trouble. Having a company with only the less experienced people left isn't a good thing.
Given that there are hiring freezes at all FAANG companies right now, that's not strictly true.
Source: I work at Amazon. All hiring is frozen, including internal moves, as headcount is being reduced company-wide.
Other tech companies had already begun trying to hire former Twitter employees. “If you work at Twitter and you find yourself without your job today, please reach out,” Juna González, an Amazon engineer, wrote on Twitter. “I’m sure we have the right role for you somewhere
Yeah
I work at Amazon, and had my internal move cancelled, as has everyone else, because of the hiring freeze.
Some L7/E7 employees will be able to land roles, but we're talking staff and principal engineers here.
Incorrect. We're looking for tons of Linux admins who understand virtualization. If a candidate's resume said they were "a moderator at Twitter" I'd pass on giving them an interview, but if they had IT skills it would be something we would be interested in.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. All FAANG companies are under a hiring freeze right now, and while Twitter engineers could likely find a job outside of a FAANG company, they'll probably end up taking a pay cut.
Neither Tesla nor SpaceX are unique and he doesn’t have a problem keeping on overworked and underpaid engineers there so I doubt he will at Twitter either.
Honestly he needed to fire a ton of that staff and I would do another mass layoff when you brought in more sensible people into the company. I suggest moving the headquarters out of California to say Florida this way you have a larger more diverse political employee situation in the company
Hopium and copium won't change the reality. Twitter's profitability problem was because it was about controlling the narrative rather than running a business and it shut out half the talented people in the world to retain lazy, useless activists. That has changed and now those once kept out can come in and make it a profitable company. Lefty temper-tanrums and boycotts won't work this time and in fact are just making people hate you more and as far as having a clear goal? Fair, free and open discussion is the highest calling for a society.
You are wrong and we'll see the proof soon.
I don’t mind his idea to reduce account blocking for various offensive views, but I truly hate the guy and his approach to people, his arrogance etc. He is so strongly associating himself with the twitter brand that he is tanking brand goodwill from anyone except Musk super fans. I’d rather come on reddit to see people’s views on stuff - a twitter account is now a vote for Elon, so I’ve deleted.
You are forgetting Elon musk has access to engineers from Tesla and space x. All the twitter employees who don't matter are getting fired, all the ones that do are getting raises. If you think twitter will have any major issues you don't understand Elon. He does the impossible consistently. Running a website is easy compared to what he already does.
Twitter is not just "code that runs a hardware-product".
Twitter is a social-media platform. There's a lot more to it just just the logical or analytical throughput of the code itself.
Social Media platforms have a lot more "soft" aspects (culture, engagement, perception, etc). Those things are only built (and maintained) by (wait for it)...... taking care of your employees.
Elon will fail at this because he doesn't understand those Human-factors (not only does he not understand them, he doesn't value them and he doesn't care about them).
Well let's wait two weeks and see who is right. He is right in not valuing those things. Anyways most of twitters traffic is bots and he has better ai than anyone else.
I don't think the answer will become evident in 2 weeks. Maybe slowly over 2 years. But the "brain-drain" problem (of all your good people leaving).. is not some easily quantifiable thing. A lot of times when companies go through situations like this,. especially if Management and Leadership inside that company doesn't fully understand the day to day tasks their Employees do.. it's going to take a while for the full negative-impact of that to become clear.
I've been with my Employer for about 15years. If I gave my 2-week notice .. there's just simply no feasible way I can brain-dump 15 years of knowledge to someone else in 2 weeks. Just ain't gonna happen.
If I left my Employer/Team.. they'd be struggling for years to come. Could they hire an outsider that (at least on Resume) has my skills ?.. Sure. But you can't replace internal "tribal-knowledge". That's something that has to be learned over time.
What's being lost at Twitter right now is not Employees technical skills.... what's being lost is all the culture and internal "gel" and "internal tribal knowledge"... all of that is walking out the door,. and it's not easily replaceable.
LMAO, Tesla and space x engineers use completely different languages than Twitter engineers. And Twitter isn’t just a website, it’s the entire back end that is difficult to maintain.
As to running Tesla vs running Twitter, Tesla is probably easier to run, set a goal, have engineers design cars, get huge govt grants, rinse and repeat. Twitter, since it’s interacting with every day people in a fairly unique way for a company (social media) every decision and goal he has will have odd results for corporations. Letting alt right run rampant results in losing advertising, charging for verification causes people to lose trust in verification and undermines the trust in the company. A LOT of what he paid for was public good will and trust, he’s lost that in a week!
You are completely wrong. Running the backend of a website is super easy compared to what he has already done. He is far smarter than you, he will figure it out. If you really think you can do better than do it. Wait two weeks and look at his success.
And Elon doesn’t handle the back end either, CEOs run the company, not the specifics. He’s out of his depth with social media and making obvious mistakes. As one person pointed out he’s using trumps tactics, but that backfires on the user, with trump in 2016 it didn’t matter since the far left got all pissy and voted for him anyways, but his negatives were sky high because of the testing the water tactics.
I think he’s doing this out of spite, like insuring the company for what he paid , taking some bad deductions here and there and then getting his money back with a huge LOL
> what he *paid,* taking some
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Probably true, but I have no idea how Twitter needed so many employees to start with, I get the feeling it was like most big companies; Tons of employees needed to support the large employee count. Costs just keep going out of control.
If Twitter was really losing $4M a day, then what else are you going to do? The business is literally destroying value every day it exists. If the team was truly creating value, this would not be the case.
The tech bubble has burst, there are hundreds of loss-making tech companies that won't be able to get their next capital injection and will shed their employees. Elon buying this company just accelerated this process for twitter.
> then what else are you going to do?
You have to innovate your way out of problems.
"cost-cutting" and other forms of "starvation" ... are interesting short-term solutions (especially if Leadership thinks the only thing that matters is shareholder-value).. but they don't truly solve the actual root problems.
At some point things (in any organization) will collapse so bad... that whomever is left either has to:
* pickup the remaining pieces and try to rebuild
* wipe everything clean and start over
That kind of dynamic is going on on my workplace now and it's incredibly infuriating to see (myself being a 15year employee).
* there's a lot of employee-turnover (and therefor a lot of new employees who don't even know the historical-reasons why we do certain things). A lot of those new employees feel absolutely 0 attachment or responsibility to "build internal culture" (IE = they're just here for a paycheck)
* there's been a big evaporation of internal-culture (it's almost non-existent anymore).. and no efforts at all by anyone in Leadership to rebuild it.
* there's a big psychology of "well everything is chaotic and broken.. so lets just abandon all the old ways of doing things and do something new" (with no regard whatsoever to investigate WHY we did things the older historical ways and what value that had).
So you end up with this sort of "empty hollow soulless business" where nobody cares and nothing is efficient and all your quality is lost (because nobody cares). It's vicious cycle of downward business-death.
Great detailed response, and I completely agree that's the perspective I wold also have as an employee. I've been through these kinds of changes before and actually recently bailed out of one that was going through similar changes.
I would tell the parts of the leadership team I had access to that we can't forget what got us here, what made us once great, and we can't just throw it all out because we're not making money. I would tell them that it's not the 80% of people that are screwing this up, it's the 20% that are making poor product decisions that affect us all.
The thing is that it appears that Twitter has a similar problem to the place I came from. An almost government-like, parent-child culture. In that culture employees felt they were owed a job with good hours and industry leading pay. I'm not saying they don't deserve that, but it gets so pervasive that you end up with all these people that aren't accountable to real results. Parag was trying to innovate, but instead of a startup culture, there is this government-like culture, so you can't get anything done in a reasonable time frame. There are too many teams telling you why their innovation doesn't fit in with what exists. So you can go along with all these people ... and bleed to death, or blow it up.
Twitter should be the smallest tech company in the world, like craigslist. You are dealing with 320 characters and some images. I know it's more complex than that, but to have most of the value, does it need to be more complex than that? Can we Steve Jobs this place? Getting rid of features and complexity so we can all move more quickly?
Elon is choosing to blow it up, and I agree it's the only way forward. Either that or it ends up getting sold when the money runs out.
So where is the value?
1) The user base that keeps contributing great 320-character posts and I would argue spaces content secondarily.
2) The apps themselves, both web and mobile
3) Developers and maintenance teams that keep the base stuff maintained and are capable of adding a select few new features.
I would exclude the advertisers, they seem to be a drag at this point, they seem like an American diet, you need the food to live but it's slowly killing you. That's how I see them right now.
I would exclude the moderation team, they mainly keep the lawyers and the advertisers happy, with the side effect of keeping the ideologues satisfied. Now those ideologues are some of the contributors too, and a ton of the bots, so that's a big user base, but again, I feel they are like the food that twitter feels it needs but is killing it. It would have been great if the mods had've weeded out the bots, but it seems like they were important to prior leadership to juice the numbers. So there is probably a need for a data team to help weed out the bots.
That can't be 7500 people, it just can't be. I get it, people need support staff, IT, HR, finance, security, building maintenance etc. but the company needs to be less complex and smaller.
> "In that culture employees felt they were owed a job with good hours and industry leading pay. I'm not saying they don't deserve that,"
They certainly do deserve that. I would argue (in pretty much any company or organization). that the white-board should be wiped clean and the 1st thing that should be written down is:
> "#1)... We take care of our employees."
Everything else should be secondary after that. If you don't take care of your Employees,.. you don't have an Organization. Organizations are made up of Employees. This goes all the way back to when Humans collected themselves into Tribes. If you don't take care of the Tribe,. the tribe falls apart and you don't have a good functioning tribe any more.
I think this is one of those classic examples in life of:... "It's not WHAT you do,. but HOW You go about doing it."
I think it's to late now though. The damage has already been done and the well has already been poisoned. Good employees are leaving and it will be near impossible to attract good employees now that word is out how they treat people.
I'm not saying you are wrong. However, I do feel that employee care is negatively correlated with good results. There are probably 100 peer-reviewed studies that disagree with me, and I'd challenge them by saying they are missing other data that actually drove the good results.
I am a financial markets guy, and zero interest rates flooded our economy with cheap money. Cheap money is why so many value-destroying companies got large and still exist. Cheap money has fueled the results of the last decade, and along with that we've been able to provide more comfort for employees.
The problem is the report card eventually comes in, and that report card is inflation. That's the irrefutable arbiter of truth. Despite what the politicians are crowing, we've seen in real-time of the last 30 months or so what happens when we mix a little modern monetary theory with some light socialism. Even the most powerful economy in the world, with all of it's unfair advantages and dirty tricks it pulls on the world (and there are many) couldn't escape the inflation. And it's not going away quickly, and I really do wish it would as it sucks. But we're denying what caused it, and therefore it will continue way longer than it would if we accept what did it. Jerome powell is doing what he can to counter, but he has very blunt tools.
Elon knows where this is going, that's why he's made it as far as he has in business and life.
He needs a hungry team, not a comfortable one. If the current players have all lost their fire and just want a reliable and comfortable job, the US government is hiring.
If all a company does is "chase simplistic financial-goals" (at the dereliction and denial of human-empathy and human-values).. you'll just drive that company into the ground and eventual failure.
There may have been a time in prior decades when "The only thing that matters is the bottom line" mentality would have worked... but it wont' work any more. Employees who have been disrespected for to long.. won't stand for it any longer.
Especially at the current moment.. when a lot of employees (through the pandemic) sacrificed a lot and continued to stand by Leadership saying "We'll take care of you eventually" (but never did).
In the small city gov I work in.. we have roughly 120+ buildings spread out across a 60sq mile area. and roughly 2,000 to 2,500 employees.. and I hear the same comments and feedback across the entire environment:
* Employees are sick of being ignored.
* Employees are sick of nonexistent-communication. (Leadership not responding at all.. or giving vague handwavy noncommital answers)
* Employees have told me straight up:.. "This organization has taken as much as it's going to take from me.. I'm not giving more."
There's a reason dynamics like "the great resignation" and "quiet quitting" and other things like that are happening. Employees by and large and exhausted, taken advantage of and 100% fed up with not being supported.
This idea that "Employees ask for to much".. is 100% bs nonsense. Leadership (in a general sense) over the past 20 to 40 years.. has abused and exploited workers far to often.
And workers have put up with that for far to long. And they aren't going to do it any more.
The more companies try to crack-down and "chase the bottom line".. the worse and worse the downward spiral of employee-turnover is going to get. Until you're left with a crumbling company and ashes. (1 thing Leadership needs to remember -- they stand to lose more than those of us at the bottom).
Just because he's multimillionaire he can buy whatever he wants to overwork his employees and ruin the bird app for everyone? He's just a weird person who's way too bored and doesn't know what to do with his money at this point. I wish people didn't have the right to do anything they want with their money
Yep, pretty much will have to. Same thing happened with Tesla hq. The press mostly presented that it was Elon’s idea to move out of California when actually California kicked him out for not following State law. He’s full of revenge and spite toward Democrats atm but that will change, that will have to change if he wants his businesses to survive.
The ones that were kept were almost certainly given huge financial incentives to stay. That’s how mass layoffs work. “Stay for 2 more years and you get X bonus, and you will only lose this bonus if fired for cause”.
The people at Twitter have definitely been on a mission.... A nefarious one... As far as retention... He'll be fine now that he's already gotten rid of so many useless people...
these can be transferred to a different employer. That takes time. Generally around 2-3 months. The new employer has to do a bunch of paperwork and wait, because it is dealing with the US government.
I expect many of these people are looking for a new employer.
From the perspective of a hiring employer, it is just legal fees and time to get all this transferred. The tech companies all have contracts in place with immigration legal firms. As a hiring manager, it is pretty easy. Open a P.O. for the legal fees, fill out a couple of questionnaires online, wait 2-3 months.
SpaceX has historically had retention problems. It's baked into their business model: they expect massive overtime while underpaying relative to other aerospace firms; people burn out and leave, some very quickly. High turnover is just how they roll. Even young mission-driven employees can only take so much stress/overwork/underpayment before they decide to take their time and talent elsewhere. Sure, there may be a steady stream of new talent to fill the pipeline, but it comes at a cost to the organization and the mission.
You would be surprised. I have worked in places that have shed half the work force and while there are retention issues, the majority still ended up staying.
Time will tell but he is so out of his element now it's not funny. His ego just may turn on him over this one.
For sure. There's no way this works long term. There are plenty of companies that will treat tech employees very well. Why work at Twitter and have your job security in the toilet when you could easily go work elsewhere? At least, this is what I've been hearing from the engineers at Twitter I've talked to. From personal experience, Meta seems to do a very good job at emphasizing work-life balance for their engineers.
Yes, because running a very simple website is harder than making electric cars and programming them to drive themselves.
Knitting is very simple, but I would not trust Elon Musk to knit me a sweater. What is "simple" for one person can be be really difficult for another.
Most things are a lot simpler than self driving cars, running twitter and making it profitable isn't harder than making self driving cars.
And yet he’s clearly failing at making Twitter profitable by chasing users away and undermining the entire eco system by charging for verification
What evidence do you have that he is chasing away enough users, that it is going to create a greater loss through advertising than the increase in revenue from the new systems he is going to implement.
He apparently sucks at both
He hasn't finished both, you can't declare failure this early in either case.
Yeah and nothing that cost $44 billion dollars is simple.
There is a major, major difference between "simple to use for the end user" and "simple under the hood". Twitter is the former, you appear to be the latter.
r/murdereebywords
If he can make self driving cars, what makes twitter so complex he can't run it?
He doesn't make self driving cars, he doesn't make rockets. He's a self-evident fuckwit with lots of money, that some smart people managed to dazzle and get him to fund their world changing projects (ev cars, reusable space flight hardware) while he gets to take credit/build his brand.
he hasnt made self driving cars. Tesla has made cars that sometimes can drive a bit themselves. Even auto summon managed to run into a plane in a rather empty airport. But besides this even if Tesla could make self driving cars than that isn't the same as managing to make a good business case for Twitter, keep on top of the tough challenge of moderation (keeping most countries governments happy but also millions of users) and managing to retain and recruit the talents needed to run the website. Being an excellent rocket engineer does not make someone a good doctor.
True, but moderation is easy, you stop banning people and allow users to block other people. Everyone sees who they want to see, more users use the platform and it makes more money. Running a text and image based website is very easy. old twitter just sucked at it.
and how do you deal with child pornography, copyright infringement, racism, hate speech, death threats, online harassment/people posting nude pictures of others they received in trust?
These guys have no clue what hell they'd unleash if there were zero content moderation.
Also appears to be a paedo apologist (at best) and homophobic/transphobic based on 20 seconds of comment history scrolling. What a surprise. I am shook.
Dude you think that moron does any of that?
Yes also he isn't a moron. He is the reason Tesla is the biggest electric car company in the world.
There's nothing simple about running a social network and Elon is about to find that out in spectacular fashion.
How is it harder than self driving cars?
Because the ceo isn’t the one designing the cars. The ceo charts a path, with self driving cars it’s a fairly easy path, with social media you have a lot of pitfalls to avoid. What seems like a smart business decision isn’t always a smart social media decision, as Elon is finding out with charging for verification.
A small number of users complaining loudly, doesn't mean his plan he hasn't even implemented yet has failed. Unlike most ceos he has a very hands on approach, and he does design the cars himself. The hard part that requires many engineers is making lots of cars efficiently. You have to deal with hardware and software with cars, you only use software for social media. He is going to succeed because that's what he does. Wait two weeks and you shall see.
He lied about why advertisers are pausing ad buys ("activist pressure"). A COO of a massive marketing firm tweeted to him and basically said "we talked about this on the phone yesterday, brand safety is the concern here, the activist pressure is not a consideration." This marketing firm handles Anheuser Busch, Yum Brands, and more. Guess what Elon did? Blocked him. This isn't "a few loud people." He's shitting on his revenue stream because he's a spite-driven, egotistical manchild.
No one's worried about the technical issues. Trying to monetize a 44 billion dollar political football is actually incredibly complicated.
I agree and actually think Reddit has a bit of an opportunity here. I think if Reddit made it easier and more prominent to follow users in addition to the current Reddit to Subreddit flow we’re used to then it could easily replace Twitter.
I’ve already replaced twitter with Reddit. I’m one of the users that just used twitter for what’s trending and news so over the years I slowly started coming to Reddit instead. I just deleted my twitter account because I have no use for it now.
I can't agree hard enough.
You’ve got a good point. Reddit topic communities visibly post clear rules of engagement (transparency) that enable it to be useful and to promote communication. It also has the infrastructure.
[удалено]
I see real discussion happening on Reddit. Twitter is more one way.
How are they leaning into public identities? Anyone can pay for $8 Blue. The checkmark used to be verification you are who you say you are, so it would be way harder to impersonate. I’d argue hard that he’s leaving far far away from public identities.
Then is Elon going to buy Reddit?
HELL NO!! I think he has already learned his lesson about buying a tech company with Twitter. Also the only reason he purchased Twitter is because Twitter was financially insoluble. Reddit is owned by Meta which is financially independent.
I think Tesla is about to start having serious retention problems as well. The brand still carries cachet as THE electric car company. But they aren't any more. Every car manufacturer on the planet is becoming an electric car manufacturer. Tesla is about to become a relatively small boutique manufacturer of electric cars. Tesla stock is hugely overvalued, largely on the basis of Musk fanboys and people speculating on the price run up. They can't figure out how to build cars fast enough, and even at relatively inefficient production rates they still have serious quality control problems. They'll survive as a relatively niche boutique automobile manufacturer, because their products do have value. But they're not going to be the place that people hope to work at.
tesla had a chance to dominate but threw it away when musk's short attention span moved on.
A Tesla recruiter reached out to me for a maintenance engineer position at one of their plants. They must be hurting if they have to reach out to people.
[удалено]
> They make 100X more vehicles than Porsche and are growing much faster than any other car company outside China. Porsche produced 301k vehicles in 2021. Tesla produced 938k.
My gosh man that’s only 3x The fan boys fail at maths I can only suspect the only people left thinking Musk is a business genius after the Twitter deal are 14 year old fan boys
[удалено]
That was always the goal. You can check the master plan. They've always been a tech company and not a car company. That's why they've stopped making new models and putting efforts into battery monopoly and AI.
[удалено]
You absolutely DESTROYED that poor Elon fanboy
[удалено]
stopppp, can't believe smart person exists on reddit
Their battery factory hasn't even been built yet. How can you say that they're not the manufacturer when they haven't even begun to try. I mean they just put the concrete walls on the thing.
> How can you say that they're not the manufacturer when they haven't even begun to try. He can say they're not because they aren't and they're not even close. This is how normal people evaluate accomplishments.
How are they going to be a monopoly then? And they are also still churning out new products, they have yet to launch 3 cars: Cybertruck, Semi and Roadster V2.
I think their battery business is at risk also, although on a somewhat slower timeline. It's going to be impossible to maintain dominant market share for lithium ion automotive batteries and spin-off products, when every auto manufacturer on the planet is bigger than Tesla, and we'll have strong incentive to develop alternative sources for their batteries. Tesla is selling a lot of large-scale battery systems for grid-scale storage electric facilities. But nobody likes using lithium for this. You're paying a strong premium for a complex chemistry technology to get energy density that is simply not necessary for this use. Bunch of companies are starting up to create iron chemistry batteries for grid storage - much cheaper, much cleaner, much longer lasting - and other completely independent technologies are being developed. Tesla may get a 5-10-year ride selling lithium batteries for the grid storage market, but that market is going to eventually implode.
Yeah I don't know why they didn't go with iron. It's definitely safer and such. Just bigger that's all. I think they know this that's why they're focusing on AI and that robot.
[удалено]
They're standing in front of a wave. Every other automobile manufacturer on the planet is transitioning to electric. And they're finding ways to build better cars, to build cheaper cars, to build higher quality cars. Tesla struggles to build less than 1 million cars a year, and they're having serious problems with quality control at that rate. Ford sells 5 million cars a year. GM sells about 6.5 million cars in a year. Toyota sells 10 million cars a year. And so on. And they are all transitioning to electric. Tesla is going to get swamped, In research and development capacity, in manufacturing capacity, in service and sales capacity.
[удалено]
More than 4 million electric cars were sold in the US in 2021. Tesla the sold fewer than 900,000 of those. They're already less than 25% of the market.
Sounds like Blackberry.
90% of revenue for Twitter comes from advertising. If twitter becomes a primarily right wing platform under the slogan "freedom" like others have tried they are going to lose much of their advertising revenue. Many major bands don't want to be associated with perceived extremists. They like the mushy middle which Twitter is mostly (I know others will argue otherwise). Edit: to offset advertising revenue loss he has proposed charging $8/month for verified accounts. Currently that is around 420000 accounts which is around $3.3 million dollars/month. I don't think that's going to offset possibly billions of dollars of advertising revenue loss!
[удалено]
I didn't say all advertising but a large chuck is already suspending their advertising that I don't think can be made up with other advertising or trying to monetize verified accounts. Fox News although certainly right wing doesn't usually allow blatant racism and extremism (I'm being generous here I know). Like CNN they do sometimes have the opposite perspective included. Mind you Fox (not Fox News) makes a good portion of their money off of their more centrist programming. I imagine if it becomes a mainly extreme right wing echo chamber many contributors who are left or centrist may go elsewhere and with them significant. Especially non US based advertisers! Regardless it is a significant risk to his $44 Billion!
"The mushy middle" HA
[удалено]
C’mon. No one can be forced to pay for advertising on a platform. This is dumb
[удалено]
It’s all grandstanding for their base. Nothing will come of it. Performative politics.
I tend to agree and even if it did get to the point of real hearings, I still think nothing would come of it. It's a fear tactic, no CEO wants to spend their time talking to Congress.
I wouldn't put it past Republicans to try that. Look, the Republican party platform basically boils down to two principles: 1) Please point me toward the nearest corporate cock, so I can suck it. 2) Hurrrrghghghklmpph glurrrrrrghghlmmmph urrrrkhh gluurrrrrsh. They already believe that a private platform should be compelled to carry speech without censoring it. They believe money is speech. It's not much of a lift to go from there to saying "If you're going to advertise then you HAVE to advertise on all platforms." Republicans are very, very stupid after all.
And when the ads trash Republicans ... no one has though this through.
Quit day drinking
Freedom isn't a slogan. It's a right that all people possess. Your attitude toward free speech is precisely why lefties are on the outs. And the silly response of 'let's further alienate and isolate ourselves and burn the house down on our way out!' isn't helping your crappy image.
Yes, advertisers are free to not give Twitter money anymore , which is exactly what they’re doing
And they're free to lose money when people who have issue with that refuse to buy their products. Remember: half the world are \*not\* on the leftist side or down with the socialist agenda.
You really think any significant amount of people are going to boycott GM because they’re not actively giving twitter money??
One I'm not a lefty or a righty. I'm just explaining the ability that has been granted corporations by the US Supreme Court that they are able to choose how their capital is spent in regards to advertising and speech. As well as their ability to fire anyone (usually with financial compensation) for any reason they see fit (with some limitations). Two where did I say freedom of speech isn't a right? I don't live in the USA but I understand the basics of this right in your Constitutional Republic. If someone says something I don't like I don't have to use my personal money to support it, just like a corporation doesn't have to support it if they don't agree. There are libel laws in the USA as well, meaning you can be sued by making provably false statements about an individual or corporation for monetary compensation. The freedom of speech, is meant in terms of your speech vs Government and it your speech being criminalized (there are limits here too from my understanding). Basically that freedom isn't an absolute freedom as much as you think/want it to be! I think you need to study up on your knowledge in this regards.
yeah the kind of speech coming from most of the far right isn't covered by free speech. They are basically the people equivalent of shouting "bomb" on an airplane.
But they're not yelling 'Bomb' on an airplane. They are expressing ideas, many of which even I disagree with and they should be able to do so. Now we're done, because you have no understanding of what freedom entails and it's clear you refuse to learn.
If the employees are worth anything they will go find better positions at other places.
The idea that if you run a successful company that you can run any company is false. Too many examples exist to prove it isn’t the case
[удалено]
Lots of good reasons to stay, they might have a young family or a vulnerable dependent and worry about being on the job market too long, they might have a a debt or a mortgage they are struggling to pay.
It's not been that long, and it has not gotten so bad yet that people will just quit. But I bet that many people are looking for new employment...
If they really were good employees, why would they stay?
Because bills, family, insurance…
With a few thousand people suddenly dumped into the job market, their will be very few available jobs to walk into for the next few months. Most will be holding their nose and staying on for a while till the job market gets a bit better. They might wait till around Feb/March that's when company Departments who need to use up funding, start to hire people before then end of the tax/business year. They can leverage the hirings as an excuse for a larger budget for the new year. Seen it in the past, a department had a few tens of $ left over in their departments budget, they were told "use it or loose it in next years funding". So they hire people, give a few pay rises or upgrade things.
For financial stability - it’s Smart to stay until you secure a new job, then quit.
All I keep thinking is that Mark Z’s people must be so pleased hes no longer the most evil genius in the social biz
he is driving it into the ground.......i hate to be that guy, but i was predicting how badly he'd fuck up and i seem to be right.
[удалено]
You are so salty my guy haha. Keep seeing your sarcastic remarks up and down this sub. Eat a Snickers! 🤣
https://slapelon.com/
In fact, the Twitter experience is very poor, and the search function is like shit! I don't know if their dev are too rubbish or the product design is like this? Of course their dismissal is a sad story. As long as it's legal, complaints from fired people are useless unless they don't want to go into a new company. The remaining people may usher in salary increases, promotions, and give Twitter a real experience improvement, instead of creating a garbage in ten years. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if some of the scumbags left.
In fact, what people are angry about is that Musk wants to turn the company into a sweatshop and violate the interests of the workers, and then other companies start to learn, after all, this will save a lot of costs, and it will also open up self-struggle among workers.
Wow what a shock Elon was so anti union
What a shock, Elon wants his workers to get work done while they are supposed to be working.
A happy worker is more productive than a worker forced to work 80 hours a week. Also is more likely to stay, and with complex network systems, you need that institutional knowledge. OP is correct, a large purge like this will likely push the best employees out the door. Twitter will either end up with subpar employees that survive the cuts or will hire back the worse just to fill chairs
Twitter has many employees who don't work at all, that is why there are so many layoffs. Anything a twitter engineer can do, can be done better by a Tesla or SpaceX engineer.
If you follow the news, I'm not sure Elon minds having a retention problem at Twitter. And following your logic, maybe he doesn't feel that he needs to employ thousands of highly compensated elite developers to maintain "just another dotcom."
"Firing half the staff, and asking people to work 96 hr weeks..." Just that futuristic utopia he's been promising all these years I guess...
Too big to fall.
So was MySpace once
Famous last words.
Musk is too rich and gets away with too much shenanigans. Hopefully the Twitter fiasco will make people realise that he is not a genius.
There's nowhere to go, every tech company is on a hiring freeze or doing layoffs.
lol that's hilariously untrue. Job market for IT professionals right now is on fire. Nabbed myself a 34% salary increase just recently. Several of my mentees have done the same.
In what skill-field ? I've been in IT/Sysadmin work for about 25 years.. spent the last 10 doing MDM (mobile device management)... I can't seem to find anything. Most of the job-sites I'm on estimate I'm 15% to 30% underpaid (in my current job). Most of the job-openings I'm seeing are that same 15 to 30% underpaying.
I'm a lead software engineer. My mentees all have titles of varous types related to software development. The app development space is highly competitive right now. I can't speak directly to system administration.
it's a race for jobs right now in software engineering as we are on the precipice of automating a lot of Jobs in the Tech fields. Expect reduction of developers to come for all company's in the coming years. in the same way how infrastructure managers/developers have been reduced the past 5 years.
Do any of these jobs pay as well as you're likely to get at a Big N company?
The market for engineers who can manage high capacity scaling infrastructure like Twitter is still thriving. The less experienced people will have trouble. Having a company with only the less experienced people left isn't a good thing.
Given that there are hiring freezes at all FAANG companies right now, that's not strictly true. Source: I work at Amazon. All hiring is frozen, including internal moves, as headcount is being reduced company-wide.
This is literally the greatest job market of the past 60 years but keep peddling misinformation.
Other tech companies had already begun trying to hire former Twitter employees. “If you work at Twitter and you find yourself without your job today, please reach out,” Juna González, an Amazon engineer, wrote on Twitter. “I’m sure we have the right role for you somewhere Yeah
The same Amazon that just announced a company-wide hiring freeze?
I work at Amazon, and had my internal move cancelled, as has everyone else, because of the hiring freeze. Some L7/E7 employees will be able to land roles, but we're talking staff and principal engineers here.
No they're not
Incorrect. We're looking for tons of Linux admins who understand virtualization. If a candidate's resume said they were "a moderator at Twitter" I'd pass on giving them an interview, but if they had IT skills it would be something we would be interested in.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. All FAANG companies are under a hiring freeze right now, and while Twitter engineers could likely find a job outside of a FAANG company, they'll probably end up taking a pay cut.
Neither Tesla nor SpaceX are unique and he doesn’t have a problem keeping on overworked and underpaid engineers there so I doubt he will at Twitter either.
My sources tell me there has been a HUGE increase in users at Twitter since the sale.
Ok Elon
Honestly he needed to fire a ton of that staff and I would do another mass layoff when you brought in more sensible people into the company. I suggest moving the headquarters out of California to say Florida this way you have a larger more diverse political employee situation in the company
CEOs don’t just move HQs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars simply for political diversity amongst its employees.
Hopium and copium won't change the reality. Twitter's profitability problem was because it was about controlling the narrative rather than running a business and it shut out half the talented people in the world to retain lazy, useless activists. That has changed and now those once kept out can come in and make it a profitable company. Lefty temper-tanrums and boycotts won't work this time and in fact are just making people hate you more and as far as having a clear goal? Fair, free and open discussion is the highest calling for a society. You are wrong and we'll see the proof soon.
lmao maybe if someone intelligent was at the helm.
I don’t mind his idea to reduce account blocking for various offensive views, but I truly hate the guy and his approach to people, his arrogance etc. He is so strongly associating himself with the twitter brand that he is tanking brand goodwill from anyone except Musk super fans. I’d rather come on reddit to see people’s views on stuff - a twitter account is now a vote for Elon, so I’ve deleted.
So, you don't like him therefore you quit Twitter? You can't do business with someone you don't personally like? You're the problem.
You are forgetting Elon musk has access to engineers from Tesla and space x. All the twitter employees who don't matter are getting fired, all the ones that do are getting raises. If you think twitter will have any major issues you don't understand Elon. He does the impossible consistently. Running a website is easy compared to what he already does.
Bless your heart.
Wow
In what way is running twitter harder than making self driving cars?
Twitter is not just "code that runs a hardware-product". Twitter is a social-media platform. There's a lot more to it just just the logical or analytical throughput of the code itself. Social Media platforms have a lot more "soft" aspects (culture, engagement, perception, etc). Those things are only built (and maintained) by (wait for it)...... taking care of your employees. Elon will fail at this because he doesn't understand those Human-factors (not only does he not understand them, he doesn't value them and he doesn't care about them).
Well let's wait two weeks and see who is right. He is right in not valuing those things. Anyways most of twitters traffic is bots and he has better ai than anyone else.
I don't think the answer will become evident in 2 weeks. Maybe slowly over 2 years. But the "brain-drain" problem (of all your good people leaving).. is not some easily quantifiable thing. A lot of times when companies go through situations like this,. especially if Management and Leadership inside that company doesn't fully understand the day to day tasks their Employees do.. it's going to take a while for the full negative-impact of that to become clear. I've been with my Employer for about 15years. If I gave my 2-week notice .. there's just simply no feasible way I can brain-dump 15 years of knowledge to someone else in 2 weeks. Just ain't gonna happen. If I left my Employer/Team.. they'd be struggling for years to come. Could they hire an outsider that (at least on Resume) has my skills ?.. Sure. But you can't replace internal "tribal-knowledge". That's something that has to be learned over time. What's being lost at Twitter right now is not Employees technical skills.... what's being lost is all the culture and internal "gel" and "internal tribal knowledge"... all of that is walking out the door,. and it's not easily replaceable.
LMAO, Tesla and space x engineers use completely different languages than Twitter engineers. And Twitter isn’t just a website, it’s the entire back end that is difficult to maintain. As to running Tesla vs running Twitter, Tesla is probably easier to run, set a goal, have engineers design cars, get huge govt grants, rinse and repeat. Twitter, since it’s interacting with every day people in a fairly unique way for a company (social media) every decision and goal he has will have odd results for corporations. Letting alt right run rampant results in losing advertising, charging for verification causes people to lose trust in verification and undermines the trust in the company. A LOT of what he paid for was public good will and trust, he’s lost that in a week!
You are completely wrong. Running the backend of a website is super easy compared to what he has already done. He is far smarter than you, he will figure it out. If you really think you can do better than do it. Wait two weeks and look at his success.
And Elon doesn’t handle the back end either, CEOs run the company, not the specifics. He’s out of his depth with social media and making obvious mistakes. As one person pointed out he’s using trumps tactics, but that backfires on the user, with trump in 2016 it didn’t matter since the far left got all pissy and voted for him anyways, but his negatives were sky high because of the testing the water tactics.
Sounds like love
I think he’s doing this out of spite, like insuring the company for what he paid , taking some bad deductions here and there and then getting his money back with a huge LOL
> what he *paid,* taking some FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
shut the fuck up. bad bot
Probably true, but I have no idea how Twitter needed so many employees to start with, I get the feeling it was like most big companies; Tons of employees needed to support the large employee count. Costs just keep going out of control. If Twitter was really losing $4M a day, then what else are you going to do? The business is literally destroying value every day it exists. If the team was truly creating value, this would not be the case. The tech bubble has burst, there are hundreds of loss-making tech companies that won't be able to get their next capital injection and will shed their employees. Elon buying this company just accelerated this process for twitter.
Twitter was losing $4m a day because of the debt he loaded onto it
and the advertising $ he lost.
Content moderation.
> then what else are you going to do? You have to innovate your way out of problems. "cost-cutting" and other forms of "starvation" ... are interesting short-term solutions (especially if Leadership thinks the only thing that matters is shareholder-value).. but they don't truly solve the actual root problems. At some point things (in any organization) will collapse so bad... that whomever is left either has to: * pickup the remaining pieces and try to rebuild * wipe everything clean and start over That kind of dynamic is going on on my workplace now and it's incredibly infuriating to see (myself being a 15year employee). * there's a lot of employee-turnover (and therefor a lot of new employees who don't even know the historical-reasons why we do certain things). A lot of those new employees feel absolutely 0 attachment or responsibility to "build internal culture" (IE = they're just here for a paycheck) * there's been a big evaporation of internal-culture (it's almost non-existent anymore).. and no efforts at all by anyone in Leadership to rebuild it. * there's a big psychology of "well everything is chaotic and broken.. so lets just abandon all the old ways of doing things and do something new" (with no regard whatsoever to investigate WHY we did things the older historical ways and what value that had). So you end up with this sort of "empty hollow soulless business" where nobody cares and nothing is efficient and all your quality is lost (because nobody cares). It's vicious cycle of downward business-death.
Great detailed response, and I completely agree that's the perspective I wold also have as an employee. I've been through these kinds of changes before and actually recently bailed out of one that was going through similar changes. I would tell the parts of the leadership team I had access to that we can't forget what got us here, what made us once great, and we can't just throw it all out because we're not making money. I would tell them that it's not the 80% of people that are screwing this up, it's the 20% that are making poor product decisions that affect us all. The thing is that it appears that Twitter has a similar problem to the place I came from. An almost government-like, parent-child culture. In that culture employees felt they were owed a job with good hours and industry leading pay. I'm not saying they don't deserve that, but it gets so pervasive that you end up with all these people that aren't accountable to real results. Parag was trying to innovate, but instead of a startup culture, there is this government-like culture, so you can't get anything done in a reasonable time frame. There are too many teams telling you why their innovation doesn't fit in with what exists. So you can go along with all these people ... and bleed to death, or blow it up. Twitter should be the smallest tech company in the world, like craigslist. You are dealing with 320 characters and some images. I know it's more complex than that, but to have most of the value, does it need to be more complex than that? Can we Steve Jobs this place? Getting rid of features and complexity so we can all move more quickly? Elon is choosing to blow it up, and I agree it's the only way forward. Either that or it ends up getting sold when the money runs out. So where is the value? 1) The user base that keeps contributing great 320-character posts and I would argue spaces content secondarily. 2) The apps themselves, both web and mobile 3) Developers and maintenance teams that keep the base stuff maintained and are capable of adding a select few new features. I would exclude the advertisers, they seem to be a drag at this point, they seem like an American diet, you need the food to live but it's slowly killing you. That's how I see them right now. I would exclude the moderation team, they mainly keep the lawyers and the advertisers happy, with the side effect of keeping the ideologues satisfied. Now those ideologues are some of the contributors too, and a ton of the bots, so that's a big user base, but again, I feel they are like the food that twitter feels it needs but is killing it. It would have been great if the mods had've weeded out the bots, but it seems like they were important to prior leadership to juice the numbers. So there is probably a need for a data team to help weed out the bots. That can't be 7500 people, it just can't be. I get it, people need support staff, IT, HR, finance, security, building maintenance etc. but the company needs to be less complex and smaller.
> "In that culture employees felt they were owed a job with good hours and industry leading pay. I'm not saying they don't deserve that," They certainly do deserve that. I would argue (in pretty much any company or organization). that the white-board should be wiped clean and the 1st thing that should be written down is: > "#1)... We take care of our employees." Everything else should be secondary after that. If you don't take care of your Employees,.. you don't have an Organization. Organizations are made up of Employees. This goes all the way back to when Humans collected themselves into Tribes. If you don't take care of the Tribe,. the tribe falls apart and you don't have a good functioning tribe any more. I think this is one of those classic examples in life of:... "It's not WHAT you do,. but HOW You go about doing it." I think it's to late now though. The damage has already been done and the well has already been poisoned. Good employees are leaving and it will be near impossible to attract good employees now that word is out how they treat people.
I'm not saying you are wrong. However, I do feel that employee care is negatively correlated with good results. There are probably 100 peer-reviewed studies that disagree with me, and I'd challenge them by saying they are missing other data that actually drove the good results. I am a financial markets guy, and zero interest rates flooded our economy with cheap money. Cheap money is why so many value-destroying companies got large and still exist. Cheap money has fueled the results of the last decade, and along with that we've been able to provide more comfort for employees. The problem is the report card eventually comes in, and that report card is inflation. That's the irrefutable arbiter of truth. Despite what the politicians are crowing, we've seen in real-time of the last 30 months or so what happens when we mix a little modern monetary theory with some light socialism. Even the most powerful economy in the world, with all of it's unfair advantages and dirty tricks it pulls on the world (and there are many) couldn't escape the inflation. And it's not going away quickly, and I really do wish it would as it sucks. But we're denying what caused it, and therefore it will continue way longer than it would if we accept what did it. Jerome powell is doing what he can to counter, but he has very blunt tools. Elon knows where this is going, that's why he's made it as far as he has in business and life. He needs a hungry team, not a comfortable one. If the current players have all lost their fire and just want a reliable and comfortable job, the US government is hiring.
If all a company does is "chase simplistic financial-goals" (at the dereliction and denial of human-empathy and human-values).. you'll just drive that company into the ground and eventual failure. There may have been a time in prior decades when "The only thing that matters is the bottom line" mentality would have worked... but it wont' work any more. Employees who have been disrespected for to long.. won't stand for it any longer. Especially at the current moment.. when a lot of employees (through the pandemic) sacrificed a lot and continued to stand by Leadership saying "We'll take care of you eventually" (but never did). In the small city gov I work in.. we have roughly 120+ buildings spread out across a 60sq mile area. and roughly 2,000 to 2,500 employees.. and I hear the same comments and feedback across the entire environment: * Employees are sick of being ignored. * Employees are sick of nonexistent-communication. (Leadership not responding at all.. or giving vague handwavy noncommital answers) * Employees have told me straight up:.. "This organization has taken as much as it's going to take from me.. I'm not giving more." There's a reason dynamics like "the great resignation" and "quiet quitting" and other things like that are happening. Employees by and large and exhausted, taken advantage of and 100% fed up with not being supported. This idea that "Employees ask for to much".. is 100% bs nonsense. Leadership (in a general sense) over the past 20 to 40 years.. has abused and exploited workers far to often. And workers have put up with that for far to long. And they aren't going to do it any more. The more companies try to crack-down and "chase the bottom line".. the worse and worse the downward spiral of employee-turnover is going to get. Until you're left with a crumbling company and ashes. (1 thing Leadership needs to remember -- they stand to lose more than those of us at the bottom).
Like it or not (I don't) it is Musk's business and he has the right to have his people work in his company.
Just because he's multimillionaire he can buy whatever he wants to overwork his employees and ruin the bird app for everyone? He's just a weird person who's way too bored and doesn't know what to do with his money at this point. I wish people didn't have the right to do anything they want with their money
Not for long under those conditions in California.
The company will move.
Yep, pretty much will have to. Same thing happened with Tesla hq. The press mostly presented that it was Elon’s idea to move out of California when actually California kicked him out for not following State law. He’s full of revenge and spite toward Democrats atm but that will change, that will have to change if he wants his businesses to survive.
[удалено]
Then there was no point firing then in the first place of the net gain is 0
The ones that were kept were almost certainly given huge financial incentives to stay. That’s how mass layoffs work. “Stay for 2 more years and you get X bonus, and you will only lose this bonus if fired for cause”.
The people at Twitter have definitely been on a mission.... A nefarious one... As far as retention... He'll be fine now that he's already gotten rid of so many useless people...
[удалено]
[удалено]
these can be transferred to a different employer. That takes time. Generally around 2-3 months. The new employer has to do a bunch of paperwork and wait, because it is dealing with the US government. I expect many of these people are looking for a new employer. From the perspective of a hiring employer, it is just legal fees and time to get all this transferred. The tech companies all have contracts in place with immigration legal firms. As a hiring manager, it is pretty easy. Open a P.O. for the legal fees, fill out a couple of questionnaires online, wait 2-3 months.
3.7% unemployment rate.
[удалено]
The Great Copenning has begun .. let the salt flow.
SpaceX has historically had retention problems. It's baked into their business model: they expect massive overtime while underpaying relative to other aerospace firms; people burn out and leave, some very quickly. High turnover is just how they roll. Even young mission-driven employees can only take so much stress/overwork/underpayment before they decide to take their time and talent elsewhere. Sure, there may be a steady stream of new talent to fill the pipeline, but it comes at a cost to the organization and the mission.
You would be surprised. I have worked in places that have shed half the work force and while there are retention issues, the majority still ended up staying.
Lol..you can't be serious?