Workers told The Verge that under Musk, Twitter has transformed into an “openly hostile” environment. And Musk—who already told employees that he would be relying on his paranoia to push through this difficult time—has possibly become so paranoid about Twitter engineers messing with Twitter code, he’s taken the drastic step of freezing them out from altering it. This happened during an “emergency meeting” held at 1:45 am on Monday, and Musk has provided no other explanation for the code freeze, The Verge reported.
Musk has said that he will grant access to code to engineers who need to make urgent changes on a case-by-case basis. But rather than talk to engineers about changes Musk might consider urgent, Musk appears to be fielding some of his questions about Twitter functionality from random Twitter users.
“As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about,” Leib tweeted.
I won’t quote it here because it’s a large part of the article, but the details of a CEO having a public discussion about his company’s product with an employee that ends in him both agreeing with the suggestions and firing him is something else. I don’t think Twitter is going to have any trouble with parody accounts any more, since Musk has proved that the concept no longer exists.
To encourage the “hardcore” work ethic that Musk told Twitter staff they must embrace to remain on his team, Musk said that people who do “exceptional” work could expect to receive “exceptional amounts” of shares. This, Musk said, is how he runs SpaceX, granting SpaceX employees stock awards on May 15 and November 15, CNBC reported.
I know it’s possible to hold stock in a privately held company, but is there any value in that for someone who no longer works there versus a publicly-traded one?
Agree to a sudden, material change to your job responsibilities in a short time window or be immediately out of a job? Frankly, I’d take three months of severance, but I’d still feel under duress.
Meanwhile…
[Edit] The original tweet was removed, I’m swapping it for the clarification below. Musk was talking about the Tesla SEC consent decree, not the Twitter FTC consent decree. In either event, “I was under duress so you can’t hold me to it” is unlikely to fly.
Of course, Elon is still convinced in spite of all evidence that Twitter’s product is the software, and not the community running on top of that software.
What on earth is so urgent to change in Twitter’s software that it required “long hours at high intensity” from the developers? It’s not like they’re a game company doing “crunch time” to meet a release date…
I wanna see it come to pass that nobody clicks it and so he has to pay 3 months severance to everyone in the company and then try to run it by himself.
That letter is all stick and no carrot. The only thing he’s offering of material value is 3 months of pay in exchange for no longer working for the company. Anyone staying is promised long hours at high intensity. Neither of those are great deals, but I know I would prefer having 3 months to look for a new job rather than burning out of the shitty job somewhere down the road and having to do so without any sort of safety net. My threshold for that kind of nonsense is significantly lower than it used to be, so I can’t fault anyone for making different choices. At this current rate, however, I’m not sure there’s going to be a twitter to work for in three months, so the decision may be moot anyway.
After Mr. Musk asked workers to decide whether to stay or go, employees were provided with an F.A.Q. document about exit packages on Wednesday. The F.A.Q., which was viewed by The Times, opened by saying Mr. Musk’s ultimatum was an “official company communication” and “not a phishing attempt.”
The F.A.Q. added that employees would have to “maximize working from an office” and “work the hours necessary to do your job at the highest level,” including early mornings, late nights and weekends.
Twitter later announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badge access until Monday.
Mr. Musk and Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, did not respond to requests for comment.
The team that maintains their internal dev/infrastructure tools quit en masse.
Rumor has it only about 25% of the people that were left actually clicked the ultimatum link, which would leave them with a little over 700 employees, down from 7500 a few weeks ago.
No estimate yet on how many of those remaining are just doing so to get through the holidays while applying to other jobs.
I have a bizarre perspective on this since I work in a very obscure part of the online world for a company that is just moving from startup to… something else (about 500 people now). Yet, we are big enough to get personal invites into the Google and Amazon (AWS) offices and get regular downloads of their culture and ideology on the regular.
The weird way this will play out in the job market will be something to see. In the past year, engineering employees (finally!) held most of the cards regarding working conditions and salary. While these engineers will never be the people who have difficulty finding work, I imagine in the short term, the silicon valley hiring managers will be swimming in candidates for a while.
I’m most worried about how this will play out in the next six months. The economy is already uncertain, and if Musk somehow pulls off a stable, functional Twitter despite all this bullshit, there’s going to be a lot of orgs thinking that maybe they, too, should think about drastic reductions in force and try and operate more leanly. I hope that doesn’t happen because the opposite lesson needs to come from this; that good employees matter and that the threat of what Musk has done needs to embolden worker organization initiatives, including unions. Even in the engineer-land guilded spaces, workers’ rights matter. If Musk gets away with what he’s doing now, the opposite may be true.
… “we won’t suspend/block/ban people, we’ll just shadowban them. maybe. If they reach our definition of “negative/hate” tweets, and whenever our neutered workforce gets around to it”
Oh. Yes. Surely this solves all of Twitter’s problems. My, look at the great savior. Such a hero.
[edit] and “no ads or other revenue to Twitter” is a lie. Both because it will probably take ages before you “deboost/demonitize”, and also because you don’t do advertising based on individual tweets! This isn’t like youtube, where a creator is punished by demonetization of their creation… you make money based on the community, not the tweet, you jackass.
I almost wish I did post on twitter, but people like Musk would block me in seconds.
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