> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed.
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
>then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.
Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many people are going to think twice about signing up to work for a company and owner that have a reputation for treating people as disposable trash.
Employees are the company's most valuable capital - so if you unceremoniously boot out the most experienced staff that was keeping the ship afloat and expect to replace them with cheap new hires while maintaining productivity, security and revenue (which weren't great at Twitter to begin with), you would have to be delusional.
Some layoffs were likely justified but thanks to the hamfisted way they were done I am sorry for the recruiters that will have to look for new staff now. They will have a very unenviable job.
> That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.
Just a data point, but Twitter is now much more interesting to me (as a place of work) than it was before. Which is to say, it went from zero interest to "maybe?"
* Chaos provides opportunities to make real changes instead of being just a tiny cog doing what you're told.
* Advancement is going to be faster in a fast-changing organization.
* It's in "go big or go broke" mode. After a year you're probably going to know which. Better than spending a decade working for a zombie.
* I'm left-of-center, yet... I find political tribalism really fucking annoying. Musk could only improve Twitter in this regard.
So it's a mixed bag. I don't have strong opinions about Twitter (I'm not really a user) but it's way too early to be writing epitaphs.
I agree. I still don't think I could bring myself to work for an adtech company, but pre-Musk twitter seemed particularly bad. Bloated, slow-moving, and stale, no direction, no vision. And if the vlogs coming out of there were any indication, a boring vapid, shallow, and entitled culture.
After Musk, there is potential where previously there was none.
> Chaos provides opportunities to make real changes instead of being just a tiny cog doing what you're told.
You think you will have autonomy or ability to make changes you want in a company run by Elon Musk? Cause by literally everything I read, his management style is pretty much the opposite.
> I'm left-of-center, yet... I find political tribalism really fucking annoying. Musk could only improve Twitter in this regard.
I can see Musk making polarization bigger, but for the love of god I cant see him making smaller.
> Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers
Where are these jobs? At startups that see they may not get another round of funding soon? At unprofitable recently IPOd unicorns that are losing money and cutting back staff? At Amazon (where I work) that just announced a hiring freeze? At Google where they admitted over hiring?
So let’s talk about the other side of the market that I am also familiar with “enterprise development” [1] - banks, bespoke internal apps that will never see the light of day outside of the company, etc. Those companies are also cutting back.
[1] I work at $BigTech. But my work involves cloud consulting mostly with enterprises and I spent most of my 20+ career as your standard “enterprise dev”.
The market is going to get tight if FAANG is on a hiring freeze/laying people off. Other companies are going to look to the FAANGs to make their decisions. It was real hot for a year but if you stick 20k developers on the market at the same time you take 20k jobs off the market combined with other companies going cold. The market is going to get tougher, even for SWE/OPS.
Yup. I've been that guy twice on projects. Started a contract. Oh all the other guys were fired/left! I laughed inside a bit, took the 6 months pay and watched it tank both times because there was fuck all I could do about it but was contracted for butts on seats only.
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want
So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.
He wanted a fresh startup to sink $44 billion into, not an existing business with employees he doesn't want, a legacy product that doesn’t fit his vision, and feature iteration velocity constraints from FTC consent decrees that a new startup wouldn’t have.
> So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.
Sounds about right. Also, I don't think he values the institutional knowledge much, and thinks he can replace it quickly, because he thinks Twitter employees were idiots and he makes reusable space rockets something something.
Now he has to find a way out of his predicament. First step, fire a lot of people to stop the monetary bleeding he caused. Second step, find others to blame - activists organizing boycotts - or have his buddy the founder take public blame for him. Third, bring in his "A-team" of super rocket EV tunnel software engineers to fix it all up to work better with 1/5th the people. I don't think he cares if he has to do institutional and human damage to achieve it.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on what kinds of unique institutional knowledge you think they've built up and what sets the Twitter employees apart from their peers at other companies. My main guess would be scaling caches and services, but even that isn't a super rare these days compared to say 2006. I'm not sure what about Twitter specifically, the app and its functions, is that complex to pass on. Coming into codebases that large is very challenging, but it's doable. Isn't the current calculus ~ lowering headcount to stay solvent vs. the risk of more lost knowledge and the other 50% of the company losing their jobs?
Well, for one, Twitter is under a 20 year consent decree with the FTC and all of the relevant leaders in charge of this resigned this week and individual twitter engineers now need to "self certify" that they're complying with the decree.
People who have intimate experience with just exactly the degree of latitude the FTC will allow for twitter and have a personal relationship that allows them to negotiate with the FTC isn't exactly a skill you can just find on the street.
For details, there are at least 2 issues with the FTC.
in 2011 there was a settlement about Failure to Safeguard Personal Information [1].
"Under the terms of the settlement, Twitter will be barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers.
Then in 2022 FTC charged Twitter for using account security data for targeted advertising. They have a $150M fine and some other conditions [2].
> what kinds of unique institutional knowledge you think they've built up and what sets the Twitter employees apart from their peers at other companies
Literally knowing how twitter codebase works. Knowing about existing issues and workarounds for them. You wont find this knowledge in other companies.
> Coming into codebases that large is very challenging, but it's doable.
Sure, but it takes awful lot of time if there is no one around to explain you stuff. By awful time, I mean really a lot of additional time.
I have followed Tesla closely over the years and this is par for the course of how he operates(similar things have happened at SpaceX but I know more Tesla specifics).
The issue is that in the case of Tesla, automakers have tried a lot of stupid things Musk have done and failed beforehand. Musk ignores those prior learnings and repeats all the mistakes that incumbents made decades ago.
What has saved his butt time and time again is the fact that he has been able to conjure up enough financial runway to re-learn the mistakes and recover and the fact that sometimes mistakes made by others in the past are no longer mistakes given today's environment and end up becoming competitive advantages. So he wins some and he loses some.
One example of him losing is when he attempted to automate all the assembly in the factory in 2017. He messed up and hired the wrong people to design the body of the Model 3 and it ended up too expensive to manufacture. In response he attempted to use robots in assembly to cut costs. The technology for what he wanted to do was still not ready just like it was not ready in the 70s when GM tried to do the same thing. Robots are Blind, one armed, and stupid. They cannot handle finesse when dealing with a noisy real world.
On the other hand, GM and others were adamant to design their cooling systems with multiple loops because that was the way things were done and it was a reliable way to accomplish the task. As a result this thinking was ingrained in all the OEMs. They have cooling departments that defend their approaches and it causes stagnation. Musk's approach of repeating all the things that OEMs already did led to him discarding beliefs that no longer are the best way of doing things and led a much better and cheaper design using one cooling loop and adjusting between heat/cold using software. When every penny counts as it does in automotive this was a competitive advantage that now competitors are copying.
As long as he has enough runway I wouldn't count him out as he seems to running the same playbook as Tesla and SpaceX.
It's weird how many people are experiencing sudden onset amnesia. Prior to Elon getting control, everyone understood Twitter was a mess, was losing tons of money and not able to get anything done for the past decade.
IIRC, Twitter was (just barely and recently) profitable, before Musk took over and saddled them with $1 billion/year in debt service and tanked ad sales.
It wasn't awesome, but it had found a working groove.
I had no idea what the financial situation was, other than that it's not part of FAANG for a reason. According to [0] Twitter was actually on a positive trajectory. Revenue has generally gone up over time. Profit wise 2020 was bad, but overall the last 5 years were much better than the 5 years prior to that. There is no shortage of companies that needed a shakeup more than Twitter.
But back then Twitter was run by the right sorts of people, not a wildcard with conservative leanings. They were running the business into the ground, but they were card-carrying socialists, so it just meant they were fucking the shareholders over and protecting workers and the marginalized. Musk is acting purely out of self-interest and spite.
I think you're right about the whole "fresh startup" idea. Some of his comments around Twitter have suggested that he might be treating this as his road to being a trillionaire by owning the public square in the US.
A lot of large companies have used twitter to announce some new product launch of marketing initiative. With the recent spate of fake blue checks like "Nintendo" posting Mario giving the middle finger or "Eli Lilly" posting insulin is now free or "Twitter Blue" announcing free twitter blue if you buy an NFT, I imagine many are rethinking this going forward.
It's still pretty much the go to place for journalists to mine quotes and sentiment from "normal people".
I'm addition, it remains a significant platform for informal celebrity and corporate announcements.
People in tech are pretty bearish about Twitter these days (myself included), but there are clearly a significant number of people who believe otherwise.
You don't have to follow "most of Twitter". There are countless awesome communities for almost any given subject.
There is room for both to be true: most of Twitter (content) is a cesspool, and yet it still is great place id you take care to curate the accounts you follow.
I think Musk wants a do-over for X.com. Whatever that means. Some kind of everything app.
If true, he bought Twitter for the branding, rather than build a new brand. If true, Twitter is about to get an extreme makeover.
$44b seems ridiculous to me. But what do I know? I've never understood the point of Twitter. Whatsapp, a mere chat app, sold for $16b. And Musk builds rockets and launched the EV auto market and...
--
I highly recommend Jill Lepore's podcast about Musk called The Evening Rocket.
"Elon Musk’s visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us – with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories and helps us understand what he’s Musk missed about them.
The Evening Rocket explores Musk’s strange new kind of extravagant, extreme capitalism — call it Muskism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies."
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent by virtue of working on some of the most interesting problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous CEOs?
Twitter under Musk would presumably have less bloat, a lot faster decisions, I'm assuming an easy escalation path that doesn't have to go through multiple layers of management, and you can be confident none of your peers are coasting.
Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time.
I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.
And how do you find "the people carrying the previous culture" and other deadwood?
You have to observe them over several weeks/months. But Elon didn't do this at all. He is about as likely to have fired the best people as the worst people.
Even then. If you are a low performer, in this market, that’s managed to survive to this point? It’s head down, cover your backside, sacrifice the person next to you if you must, and hope you make it through… People in survival mode will do anything to keep on surviving.
In crumbling organisations, being willing to just stubbornly stay can even give underperforming people a shot at promotions they'd be unlikely ever get otherwise by virtue of becoming the most senior persons in teams with gaps above them.
>He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational.
But this is my point. By doing it in this order he is risking continued operation of Twitter because he no longer can ensure Twitter can either properly staff business critical teams or retain critical institutional knowledge for how to run the company. He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
> He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
Both he and the market know that he paid too much for Twitter. It isn't worth $44B, but he needs to make it lean enough to start throwing off enough cash to pay back the loans he took to buy it at that price.
Since it is very hard to increase revenue (especially when he is allowing more advertiser-repellent content), he is trying to dramatically cut costs while trying to increase non advertising revenue.
He can't go back to the banks and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and explain to them that he needs a deferment so he can invest in more efficient SRE and content moderation. He has to sleep in the bed he made, which means show his creditors the money.
Counterparty risk.
Do you have think the banks and Saudis want $1B this year and $0 after when Twitter collapses, or $0 this year and $500M in future years?
Do you Elon wants the banks to foreclose and seize Twitter? Or have to sell TSLA?
Seems like he's trying to speed run employees jumping ship - I'm surprised he didn't try these tactics for a month or two before firing a bunch of people and paying severance.
That's not trying the tactic though, that's just saying an idea he has, which with Elon is the sort of thing that happens every 2 minutes and I doubt anyone takes seriously.
> He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making
While I think he has done a huge amount to scare away advertisers, I expect the ad industry as a whole is going to be seeing reduced profits for the next couple of years.
Making a bunch of unpopular changes and waiting a month still seems more prudent. The people most likely carrying that culture are gonna be the ones most inclined to leave over changes, and if they are leaving on their own that would decrease costs associated with benefits or the increase to the unemployment tax that comes with layoffs
Changes to terms of employment make employees who quit because of them eligible to collect unemployment. It's one of the few reasons workers are eligible for unemployment when they voluntarily quit.
Yea was just reading how this likely prompted facebooks giving the November vest to their laid off employees was likely driven by similar labor protection laws. After having worked for a Georgia headquartered company for 2 years I don’t think I can work for a company outside a blue state again. The worker protections, minimal as they are in the US, kicked in multiple times as the company kept trying to fuck us over
Agreed, I've gotten some really great offers out in Texas but I'm not willing to live somewhere that gives employers and asset owners carte blanche to do what they want and everyone else can just go screw themselves.
I'm currently hearing some horror stories from friends who did take similar offers and were enticed by the relatively lower cost of living. Turns out there are reasons it's lower.
Twitter was losing money but for years they would have been profitable except they were handing out executive stock compensation like they were Facebook.
That wasn’t great but there was an obvious path to profitability. Musk just added somewhat over a billion in new annual debt servicing so it went from “stop going to nightclubs every day” to “sell the furniture”.
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.