Getting laid off at twitter was likely a blessing
With Musk's current antics, people who were laid off of Twitter got severance and had their decision made for them. Many that remained at Twitter will fall victim to Elon's general insanity and unattainable goals. And many won't be able to leave because of personal, visa or other reasons. Calling employees into the office for "at least" 40 hours means he actually wants them there for 50, and probably working for 72. Employee suicides we're up back before the pandemic, and I wouldn't be surprised (I really hope it doesn't get to this) if it happens again. The recent MIT review article suggests that their ops are already showing external signs of problems, and I wouldn't be surprised if Musk is calling daily fire drills and there's a daily Musk "war room" by now over there. If you're still at Twitter, I'd really suggest quitting and finding something new. At least you have everyone's sympathy now. Not so in a month or two when the rest of the layoffs take place and you have Elon breathing down your neck... There's a lot of reasons to hope Elon to fail, but really I think most of us on Blind should be hoping for Elon to fail. If he gets his way, many companies will see this as the green light to overwork and underpay employees again, and we'll see policies like that of China's 996 and even Carnegie-like overwork from the 1890s start to take hold. All not great for any of us. #tech #overwork #elon TC 320k
Don’t say hail marry till they find new jobs
For those who say Twitters 7k employees were too much, what does Meta do with almost 80K and Google with 200K employees. End of the day, you could wittle whose down to 5k-10k since they are still making most of their money from their original idea/product. That should be on autopilot mode by now. You have headcount to create new products. When Elon thinks of one, he'll have to ramp up again.
Well, you completely ignored scaling the original product. Even though it's software it's not like you can just copy paste
As someone who knows a bunch of Twitter employees, that place did have a lot of waste. I was really surprised by 85 employees in Boulder. The Boulder office is mainly their Gnip service. The very very small subset of people that work there account for something like 30% of Twitter’s revenue. I think the decision on who to let go was mostly random.
Well, the problem with labor waste is that it actually is subjective, and hard to debate without knowing specific management goals. What one management team thinks of as waste another can think of as business critical. 100 SREs might seem like excessive for a microblogging platform, until someone explains to it the challenges of needing to randomly scale. What we do know is - Musk was barely at the company a few days and probably had very little time to do any DD and was in it more for the theatrics. This is very unlike Zuckerberg who had time and knew what to cut (bootcamp, recruiting, robotics without impacting the business too much).