Sure. You say that now. But without Twitter, how will NYT and Fox News learn about the daily moral panic? Have you ever seen an addict go cold turkey? It ain't pretty. Do you really want an entire nation's mediascape to end up in the ER?
>What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email.
…
>As we’re all very aware, folks on visas are stuck, so thats who makes up most of the roughly 25% (or less than 1,000….) expected to stay. The actual impact is not yet known — there have been no internal comms about what comes next. We’re nearly 2 hours post deadline.
>Update: Employee’s badge access has been disabled until Monday. It does seem like there will be … not much left of the company by then.
>Something I can now add: 10% of the 3,700ish remaining employees deemed critical were called to a meeting an hour before the 5PM deadline today. The invite was sent around midnight but got cancelled by noon.
>Story* to be updated soon with more: Am hearing that several “critical” infra engineering teams at Twitter have completely resigned. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” one current engineer tells me of one such group.
>No special exceptions made for those on parental leave or with work visas, either. …
>Twitter employees are being forced today to make a decision with no details on either end of their answer: If they stay, they don’t yet know how their comp will work with Musk’s coming stock plan, and if they leave they don’t get to see their actual severance agreement yet
>We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they're still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.
>Offices will reopen on November 21st. In the meantime: "Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere."
>if you're a twitter employee and would like to share how things are going, email me at mia@theverge.com. everything off the record until you say so/agree.
> Another sw engineer was telling me he was really excited when Elon took over, and could not wait to work with him. Then was confused why Elon treated Twitter so poorly. e.g. didn't even talk with staff. Then this person was fired as part of the 50%.
It's interesting that people don't want to see Musk for who and what he is. They always want to learn the hard way.
I think it's interesting these threads (and others) focus on pretty much just engineers as opposed to the massive hits to HR and related divisions. [0,1]
I know a number of engineers who would privately admit a Twitter with fewer HR types would be a better place to work, not worse. I'm not sure the dire predictions are going to come true. Then again, I'm not an oracle, and of course I know many who would be (publicly) happy to take the severance and run.
> I know a number of engineers who would privately admit a Twitter with fewer HR types would be a better place to work, not worse.
I would not be surprised if this is the case in 90% of companies. And it's because in most cases employees don't understand the role of HR. It has nothing to do with making employees lives better, and everything to do with making interactions with employees most profitable for the company and protecting the company from employees and their actions.
That's because this thread is discussing Twitter's new work conditions and severance offers, which are leading to many engineers quitting (on top of those that were already fired). It's different from the broader industry where more superfluous roles were targeted for layoffs.
HR ultimately exists to provide some massive amount of value to the company, otherwise they wouldn't exist. The question then is what value do they deliver? If the low-level humans serving as resources don't know what that value is, the odds are that HR's existence is not to their benefit.
While possible, I'm not sure an HR reduction in combination with 70% of your peer engineers resigning is exactly what those Twitter engineers considered.
> Talking with a software engineer who was fired by Musk. This person is saying they are conflicted. They feel mistreated, but want Twitter to survive - in spite of him, because of its outsized importance to the world.
> I agree.
I was following along just fine until this bit of corporate koolaid slipped out.
It's completely bizarre how deep in people go. It's a messaging website with a character limit, image attachment and adverts. That's it. It does nothing else. It was a little innovative in 2006, back when iPhones didn't exist and Gmail wasn't public.
People who work there aren't "changing the world". They're just greasing some very ordinary revenue skids.
This is a profound misunderstanding of what makes Twitter valuable. Of course the technology isn’t anything special. Of course the features aren’t revolutionary. The value is in the people that use it and the connections between them. That’s something that takes years of hard work; it can’t simply be built or bought.
Exactly. I've gotten a lot of value out of Twitter because all my research collaborators are on it, as are their collaborators, and so on. It's a convenient place to keep track of all that. Twitter failing scatters that network to who-knows-where, and it'll take a long time (if ever) for it to coalesce like that again.
It's going to be hilarious when nothing happens aside from a few crashes, Twitter usage increases, and Musk takes it public in three years as a lean and profitable company. I'm enjoying this spectacle, but maybe not for the same reason most are enjoying it.
I would be pleased to see this happen, but the part of the equation I don't understand is that Musk seems to have unnecessarily alienated many of the firms advertising on Twitter, which is a big hit to revenue if the companies don't come back.
In most cases, you can keep a platform going for a tiny fraction of the manpower that it takes to keep stuff alive while building new stuff. If Twitter hasn't dropped its killer feature by this point, they can probably make do without it.
I've seen companies in Twitter's position with much worse tech stacks and much worse engineers have their stuff hang on for decades in the financial services world. Any maintenance problem can be pushed back indefinitely if you keep throwing money at the right consultants.
Personally, I hope it burns to the ground for the exact same reason.