The interesting parts it going to be how many people that are important to keeping Twitter running are going to quit in addition to the fired ones. It's not going to be a nice place to work for, so those people that are financially well off and those that can get good jobs somewhere else are probably considering their options right now.
The whole thing could have been avoided if Twitter/Elon had done it step-by-step instead of terminating staff in bulk. Everyone in tech is reducing headcount, but Elon likes to do stuff on a grand scale. He needs a human Twitter firewall (social media team who can say "NO") to verify each Tweet before sending it, causing chaos every day. But what do I know? I have never been CEO, so I have no idea.
Well, apparently being a CEO isn't that demanding, considering that you can be CEO of three pretty big companies at the same time and still find some free time to shitpost on Twitter.
He just spent $44 billion to eliminate any firewall between him and his audience. His whole thing is turning a dashed off thought on Twitter into a binding commitment that causes dramatic changes.
> it's not going to be a nice place to work for, so those people that are financially well off
I beg to differ. People who are crucial to operation will be much better off. Less meetings, less bloat, less bs, probably better salary.
I do consulting. Recession is good for business, companies lay off team of 10 developers and replace it with single remote consultant for 40% of cost. Also less taxes, since I work in different country.... You do the math.
Why would you expect their salary to increase. And I think the whole "work the whole weekend to get the new Twitter Blue done" thing shows what kind of workplace this is likely going to be in the future.
- Elon said there are 10 managers for one engineer. We can argue about numbers, but I am pretty sure there are no 10 engineers for 1 manager
- Web UI is crap, it is slow to load etc... If twitter would accept pull requests, I would fix it myself. I am pretty sure tech people are frustrated by situation.
- I do not see any research from Twitter into federated networks, cryptography... I did interviews with twitter in 2012, this stuff was all cut latter... I think Musk may sponsor this type of research just to push his Dogecoin BS.
- Read how "hostile takeover" looks like. It is mess, also it is very very sensitive week. "work the whole weekend" is irrelevant. Things will look very different in two weeks!
- Key people will be able to renegotiate their contracts, with much much better salary. You probably need 100 people to run twitter. See Whatsapp...
It depends entirely on the projected trajectory of the company. If the company is laying off people and is trending towards bankruptcy, the smartest rats will be the first to jump off the sinking ship.
I'm not sure Twitter is in this particular boat yet, but if I was working at Twitter right now, I would definitely be brushing up on my plan B pronto.
Project cleanup after sweatshops. Team quits on spot, leaves mess, no documentation. I put project back on track, documents things, help to hire new developers...
Business people in Twitter did not generated any profits (sales, positive PR...). I totally understand Elons position.
