Musk to cut half of Twitter jobs and end remote work for the rest, report says

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1_rick

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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-twitter-staff-reverse-work-from-home-policy/

Today it's coming out that he has, in fact, fired probably half of the employees. Early on, there was a bunch of talk about WARN act violations and supposedly a lawsuit was already filed over it. However, the "you're fired" and "you're safe" emails seem to have just been released, and the "you're fired" email sais "today is your last day of work, but your separation date is February 2, 2023", meaning Musk is actually giving people 90 days notice. The letter says that affected employees will be paid, including benefits, through their termination date, but that all access is being cut off, and at least one ex-employee posted a screenshot of his twitter.com Gmail account having had its password changed, locking him out of it.

Notice was also sent out that the office is closed today, and all badge access to the buildings was temporarily disabled, undoubtedly to prevent any revenge.

Also, the commenters over at Arse are incandescent with rage. Whatever you feel about the issue, I'd recommend staying out, as there's a gigantic amount of bile.
 
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-twitter-staff-reverse-work-from-home-policy/

Today it's coming out that he has, in fact, fired probably half of the employees. Early on, there was a bunch of talk about WARN act violations and supposedly a lawsuit was already filed over it. However, the "you're fired" and "you're safe" emails seem to have just been released, and the "you're fired" email sais "today is your last day of work, but your separation date is February 2, 2023", meaning Musk is actually giving people 90 days notice. The letter says that affected employees will be paid, including benefits, through their termination date, but that all access is being cut off, and at least one ex-employee posted a screenshot of his twitter.com Gmail account having had its password changed, locking him out of it.

Notice was also sent out that the office is closed today, and all badge access to the buildings was temporarily disabled, undoubtedly to prevent any revenge.

Also, the commenters over at Arse are incandescent with rage. Whatever you feel about the issue, I'd recommend staying out, as there's a gigantic amount of bile.
Consider the source when looking through the comments. All peas from the same pod.
 
Also, the commenters over at Arse are incandescent with rage. Whatever you feel about the issue, I'd recommend staying out, as there's a gigantic amount of bile.
Au contraire

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I'd be interested in seeing what the majority of jobs were, that were terminated. I'd imagine this is more of a business decision than anything else and twitter probably had a lot of "useless" jobs.
 
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-twitter-staff-reverse-work-from-home-policy/

Today it's coming out that he has, in fact, fired probably half of the employees. Early on, there was a bunch of talk about WARN act violations and supposedly a lawsuit was already filed over it. However, the "you're fired" and "you're safe" emails seem to have just been released, and the "you're fired" email sais "today is your last day of work, but your separation date is February 2, 2023", meaning Musk is actually giving people 90 days notice. The letter says that affected employees will be paid, including benefits, through their termination date, but that all access is being cut off, and at least one ex-employee posted a screenshot of his twitter.com Gmail account having had its password changed, locking him out of it.

Notice was also sent out that the office is closed today, and all badge access to the buildings was temporarily disabled, undoubtedly to prevent any revenge.

Also, the commenters over at Arse are incandescent with rage. Whatever you feel about the issue, I'd recommend staying out, as there's a gigantic amount of bile.
It is so fun trolling Ars.
I would have stopped reading their stuff long ago... but they do manage the odd interesting unbiased article. Some of their science writing is decent. Their takes on almost anything are comical. Poking their commenters is really too easy, I shouldn't waste my time but I can't help myself.

So many obviously very low life experience people on that site. When a big company changes hands houses get cleaned.... locking everyone out. Ya when your product can be essentially destroyed by one pissed off engineer you don't give them a weeks notice and let them have fun on the network. That some of these employees leaked their private internal emails... is proof they at least deserved to be let go. It is also probably proof that if Elon allowed them to get the news at their desks in the office they probably would have made a scene.
 
I had read that there was a big bonus date coming up, and he is laying people off a few weeks before the bonus to avoid paying it, which is really shitty.

Restructuring needs happen, and from everything I've heard Twitter really needed to be reorganized.

It was a bureaucratic hellhole, where you needed a weekly recurring meeting of 20 participants saying the same thing over and over again for several months in order to accomplish even the slightest little thing, like move an icon 5px to the left, and in which any changes or improvements happened at an absolutely glacial pace.

The company clearly needed to be shaken up a little, but the timing of this compared to the upcoming bonus payment was really shitty (unless they compensated them for that in their severance packages)

That said, employment in the U.S. is generally at will and can be terminated by either party at any time, so there really should be no expectation of eternal employment. it's the people who want a position more than a job who are usually the anchors that drag any organization down.

I don't share Musks contempt for remote work. The few large sample size research studies on the subject show that productivity actually increases with remote work, but its not a biggie. The people who want remote jobs will find them elsewhere. Even with the fed doing its best to slow down the economy there are still almost 2 available jobs for every person who wants one, and that number goes way way way up when it comes to tech and STEM type jobs.
I've been trying to hire two engineers for almost a year with very little success, and my company is offering pretty competitive compensation, benefits and vacation packages. We just can't get the people.

Last time I was laid off (huge project was canceled resulting in big layoffs) I got 10 weeks of severance and had a new job within a month, essentially earning six weeks of double salary, which was pretty nice, and that was 10 years ago before the current job market crunch. A job loss can be scary if you've become comfortable in a job, but I imagine most of these people will land on their feet, and many will even wind up in better jobs with better pay.

The situation today is very different than 2007. That was rough.
 
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I had read that there was a big bonus date coming up, and he is laying people off a few weeks before the bonus to avoid paying it, which is really shitty.
As I said in the OP, the purported letter to people who were fired makes it clear that while today is their last day of work, their termination date is 3 months out. Given Musk has committed to giving them a more generous severance package than he's required to, he might well decide to follow through on the bonus, but this is the first I have heard of it.
 
It was vital to cut these employees off immediately because it has already been shown that many of these entitled liberal employees are happy to sabotage things on their way out, etc. Most of these jobs were probably related to content moderation, aka censoring content that didn't align with their liberal bias. The people who decided to ban Trump while allowing hate-filled posts from the Iranian government, etc, were the problem, and I'm glad to see them get fired.
 
I had read that there was a big bonus date coming up, and he is laying people off a few weeks before the bonus to avoid paying it, which is really shitty.

IMO people should get a bonus if they are doing things that are actually productive for the company. Maybe that applied to some of the people who got fired, but not most. For most of the people who got fired, their job should not have existed in the first place.
 
I had read that there was a big bonus date coming up, and he is laying people off a few weeks before the bonus to avoid paying it, which is really shitty.

Restructuring needs happen, and from everything I've heard Twitter really needed to be reorganized.

It was a bureaucratic hellhole, where you needed a weekly recurring meeting of 20 participants saying the same thing over and over again for several months in order to accomplish even the slightest little thing, like move an icon 5px to the left, and in which any changes or improvements happened at an absolutely glacial pace.

The company clearly needed to be shaken up a little, but the timing of this compared to the upcoming bonus payment was really shitty (unless they compensated them for that in their severance packages)
Untrue.
The letters that have been leaked from fired employees... clearly say their termination date is 90 days away. That they will be paid out all that is owed too them until that date.
3 months of pay and benefits out the door, doesn't seem that evil to me.
 
IMO people should get a bonus if they are doing things that are actually productive for the company. Maybe that applied to some of the people who got fired, but not most. For most of the people who got fired, their job should not have existed in the first place.

For the overwhelming majority of individual employees it is not their job to set corporate strategy. They should be measured against their goals that management have given them. If those goals are erroneous, and they are being instructed to work on thins that are not benefitting the organizatrion, then that is a management problem, not a employee problem.

Ultimately, most company problems are management problems, not individual employee problems. There are exceptions, but generally that is the case.

I believe it was W Edwards Deming who in his work on the Toyota Production System (though it may have been Joseph M. Juran) said that you always blame the system before you blame the individual worker. Most workers try to do a good job and follow the instructions they are given, and if they fail, it is generally the system (the procedure, the process, the form, etc.) that has failed them, not them who have failed the company.
 
Why do we care that Twitter employees were fired?
Mostly because some of them are making such a show of it.

I swear some of these people would rather have went into work got herded into one big office with no computers/phones... and called into an office one at a time to be escorted out. Getting a letter that says stay home... seems a lot more humane then the mass layoffs that happen in many large companies. No walks of shame for the twitter layoffs.
 
Mostly because some of them are making such a show of it.

I swear some of these people would rather have went into work got herded into one big office with no computers/phones... and called into an office one at a time to be escorted out. Getting a letter that says stay home... seems a lot more humane then the mass layoffs that happen in many large companies. No walks of shame for the twitter layoffs.

I don't see why it needs to be a walk of shame.

There is no shame in being laid off. Business needs change all of the time. It happens.

If you've worked in any industry long enough, soon enough you are going to encounter a restructuring that necessitates layoffs.

Being fired for cause on the other hand...
 
Twitter's in San Francisco, right? The city where you can steal from store shelves and pitch your tent, after stealing one of course, anywhere you want to without any fear of legal retribution.....they're gonna be *fine* I tell you.......
 
I'd be interested in seeing what the majority of jobs were, that were terminated. I'd imagine this is more of a business decision than anything else and twitter probably had a lot of "useless" jobs.
Yeah I was talking with my wife this morning about it and both of us had the same idea "what the hell do they have so many employees for when most of the content is provided by the end user"
 
That said, so Musk was in fact forced to buy Twitter after signing papers saying he would, then saying he didn't want to anymore, and now in again. Is he broke yet?
 
I don't see why it needs to be a walk of shame.

There is no shame in being laid off. Business needs change all of the time. It happens.

If you've worked in any industry long enough, soon enough you are going to encounter a restructuring that necessitates layoffs.

Being fired for cause on the other hand...
Agreed. Some of the reaction to this is silly. Companies merge and lay people off or downsize jobs all the time.

I say walk of shame... because it seems like that is what some of these people would have preferred. They all got told to stay home and by the end of the day the people being let go knew who they where and those staying knew how they where. They didn't force anyone to be in a state of limbo for more the a few hours. There are many stories of mergers where employees ended up sitting in offices with no working phones for hours waiting for their turn in the office to have their job picked apart and have some new manager type decide if they are done or not.

Some of the reaction is head shaking. People acting indignant because they got locked out of company laptops... and emails. I mean ya what would you expect if your being let go, or the company is firing 3,700 people that day.
The Ars commenters are insane. So many of them claiming this is somehow illegal. Everyone of the 3,700 people let go (and that does suck for them) today are getting 60-90 days of pay and benefits.
 
That's the expression. I got laid off once, when my entire department got downsized, and I don't know how you can describe being walked out to your car by security as anything *but* a walk of shame, even though I hadn't done anything wrong.
I worked for a company where they closed a branch... and they decided they where going to let everyone there go rather then offer to move to a different location. It wasn't my doing... but I was asked to come in to help one of the big bosses inventory cash on hand ect. Those poor people (even if a few deserved to be let go) had a shit day... and ya walk of shame is the only way to describe it.
 
Some of the reaction is head shaking. People acting indignant because they got locked out of company laptops... and emails. I mean ya what would you expect if your being let go, or the company is firing 3,700 people that day.
The Ars commenters are insane. So many of them claiming this is somehow illegal. Everyone of the 3,700 people let go (and that does suck for them) today are getting 60-90 days of pay and benefits.

Yeah, unless I am missing something there is nothing illegal here.

It's best practice to shut off access coordinated with a layoff to avoid foolish "revenge" activity. A company that doesn't do this is moronic.

Your work email was never YOUR email. Your work laptop was never YOUR laptop.

Shame on you if you did personal stuff on work equipment. That's not their fault.
 
Yeah I was talking with my wife this morning about it and both of us had the same idea "what the hell do they have so many employees for when most of the content is provided by the end user"

A friend of mine had a remote contract position there for a while.

He is a software developer and he absolutely hated it. There were tons of people, none of whom were empowered to do anyhting, so they just wasted their time in pointless meetings instead. It took the equivalent of an act of congress to make even the smallest little insignificant change.

He was supporting a department that was doing statistical analysis on user behavior.

We all know that social media profits are tied to user time on the platform, so they would do stupid little studies to see how to maximize user platform time.

You know. Make a tiny change to the user interface. Move an icon 5px to the left, then push it out to a sample size of users (10,000 users? I don't know, I just made that up.)

Measure how the average time on platform differs between this sample size of users which got the seemingly insignificant UI change compared to the overall population. If it increased user time on platform by a few seconds per day on average, great! Implement it.

Rinse and repeat over and over and over again.

He is quite an accomplished software developer with many years in encryption and research in healthcare. This was his first job in a silicon valley type of company. He said the money was absolutely fantastic, but he absolutely hated it. Wound up leaving after only a few months. Found it too frustrating how he was working on stuff that didn't matter, and how it was impossible to get anyhting done due to the glacial pace of everything.
 
Yeah I was talking with my wife this morning about it and both of us had the same idea "what the hell do they have so many employees for when most of the content is provided by the end user"
You need a lot of people to make sure only approved information is allowed.
 
Yeah, unless I am missing something there is nothing illegal here.
Had Musk not arranged the 90-day "working but not working" period, it would've been a definite violation of the WARN act. The fact that he'd done so didn't come out until probably midday, though, and that's where the "we've got him now!" came from.
 
at least one ex-employee posted a screenshot of his twitter.com Gmail account having had its password changed, locking him out of it.

Oh how horrible! Oh wait, this is standard practice when someone's employment ends.
 
Oh how horrible! Oh wait, this is standard practice when someone's employment ends.
I know that. You know that. Everyone here knows that. Apparently the people working at Twitter are too young and/or naive to have experienced it.

Then again, the tweet I saw--no idea how I'd find it again--didn't seem to be reeing so much as just telling the world he'd been fired.
 
what the fuck is even the game plan

$1 billion/yr estimated interest expense to fund this powerplay.

the company has basically never made money and was still hundreds of millions in the red last year.

90% of the revenue was advertising - a commodity they're now hemorrhaging.
 
Right, its dead now because both sides of the story can be heard. CHECK.

Also, why do people feel the need to announce they are leaving twitter? NO ONE CARES.
Nope, it's because:

what the fuck is even the game plan

$1 billion/yr estimated interest expense to fund this powerplay.

the company has basically never made money and was still hundreds of millions in the red last year.

90% of the revenue was advertising - a commodity they're now hemorrhaging.
 
what the fuck is even the game plan

$1 billion/yr estimated interest expense to fund this powerplay.

the company has basically never made money and was still hundreds of millions in the red last year.

90% of the revenue was advertising - a commodity they're now hemorrhaging.

Elon Musk said straight-up that part of the reason for the fee for verified users is to generate extra income, because advertising wasn't enough.

Halving the workforce will certainly reduce expenses. I'd bet that more cuts are coming in the future. It shouldn't take so many employees to simply operate a free-speech platform.

I'd guess that we will probably see more "premium features" offered to those who use Twitter the most, at extra cost - like maybe the ability to post longer tweets so that they don't have to post 13 small tweets in a row just to say what they want to say.

If Twitter goes under at this point, that does not bode well for the future of our country IMO. There needs to be free speech on the Internet, and this is potentially the closest we've been in a while. You can't have free speech when every platform is a censored liberal sanctuary.
 
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