Anyone work for Twitter?

[Star555]

What's the situation like right now? I'm hearing that employees have been locked out and are waiting for an email telling them whether they can stay or must go. Half the staff are expected to be fired -- can't believe it!

(I don't work for Twitter or personally know anyone who does.)

You’re supposed to consult for at least 30 days before making 20 or more employees at one establishment redundant within a 90 day period. But as per my PP, that didn’t stop P and O Ferries

As the PPs have said, there is a statutory consultation period if you are making a certain number of employees redundant - I am wondering how they will show a fair selection process but (again, as other PPs have said) I doubt Musk is too bothered about the minor legal details like that. Must be awful for the Twitter employees, whether you end up going or staying this kind of situation just kills morale. No winners in this one, unfortunately.

If they’re being paid up until 2nd Feb, then surely that’s the 3 month garden leave. So they’ve been given 3m notice with immediate effect/garden leave.

My early Christmas present is Elon Musk losing literally tens of billions by buying Twitter. Honestly, if it implodes within the week, I'll know that some kind of deity exists.

Why?

@ThistleSifter I think that is correct all exiters are on gardening leave. If I was one of those that had been selected to stay. I would get a plan B sorted ASAP. Mr Musk has shown he has a complete lack of morals. Way to demoralise a large chunk of your workforce in one go.

Elon Musk losing money is funny because he's a clueless idiot who tried to wriggle out of this sale and made out like being forced into it was totally a thing he wanted. Also, he did it because some kid on Twitter was tracking his flights and called him names. The cultists having the emperor shown to have no clothes and not be the industrious galaxy brain they and the media seem to project is amazing comedy to witness.

Twitter not existing would be a net benefit to humanity. Facebook is currently imploding because The Zuck thinks the future is pretending you're in The Sims 2 for a work meeting courtesy of $1500 headgear no one wants to wear. Might as well start 2023 without social media, and looks like we're making progress.

Do we know that any UK twitter employees have actually been let go? I've only seen evidence of people in SF. I work for a similar tech company in the UK and they also get rid of people at the drop off a hat via settlement agreements and a payoff or 3m gardening leave. What's he's done is really pretty standard in the tech world and no one cares about local employment laws as they take the money and 3m to find a new job with what looks like continuous service as they are on gardening leave and get a reference as part of the settlement agreement. During COVID my company cut 20% of the UK employees overnight (people were told by phone though) as a buffer against drop in sales due to the pandemic. I thinks he's doing a bit more but again it's pretty normal in tech companies, rightly or wrongly.

It is harsh for the people let go but it's only newsworthy because it's him and twitter. And the silicon valley tech world is of course very well paid.

There are no companies in recent history that have laid off 50% of the workforce without any real plan or coherent public facing roadmap as what to do next.

Musk is a genius, I'm told.

I don't think Elon Musk plays by the same rules but I certainly would describe him as an idiot! He's demonstrated that he is able to run multiple million dollar high risk businesses at the same time. Twitter appears to have been losing £4m a day so whatever he does has to be brutal. He's also not too worried about losing money to gain in the much longer term.

He stepped down as CEO of Tesla due to fraud charges. His original name for PayPal was X which his co-investor and brains behind the project told him was terminally stupid. SpaceX engineers tell him to go away because, no, we’re not landing Starship on Mars to set up bases in looks at notes current year, because it hasn’t even gotten to orbit yet.

His endgame for Twitter is to OD on some hard drugs while trying to reconcile pleasing his racist base, sorry, “freedom of speech” warriors and also not scare off advertisers. His overleveraged buyout is possibly going to blow through what paper wealth he has to hand faster than if he had to pay child support to all the supposed kids he’s brought into this world.

The advertisers have already gone. And his next bold move is to… release a list of companies no longer putting ads with Twitter.

This is “do what I say or I’ll shoot myself again” levels of incompetence.

It's interesting seeing the people acting as though Twitter wasn't always a biased mess. It didn't care about death and rape threats against women or paedophilia and actively misrepresented the protected characteristics so misogyny could flourish. The moderation and trending topics were manipulated by staff with definite anti-women agendas.
I don't have much sympathy for people wailing that they may have one less place to freely abuse women and normalise paedophilia.

It's gardening leave.

Very normal in the tech world. The companies even list the names of those who have been cut on their website so other tech companies can hire them.

I don’t care about Twitter (never used it) or Elon Musk, but the whole idea of the richest man alive buying another company and then sacking half the workforce really terrifies me about the future of workers rights. Employees of tech companies might be ok because of the skill set they have, but what will happen when the rich move on to acquiring other companies that have more unskilled workforces? If the majority of companies are owned by a very small minority, what choice will we have other than accept low paid work, and struggle even more?

Maybe I’m just overthinking this though.

@edwinbear slightly off topic, but what happened to your personal handbag stuff? Someone trying to forcibly separate me from my means of both communication and getting home would not get very far with me.

He's not the sole owner of Twiiter is he , some Middle Eastern prince type has a very large stake in it too .

Musk is a grade 1 bell end always attention seeking in the media

No one here would miss Twitter if it disappeared tomorrow. And that's it's problem.

After this no one here is more likely to use Twitter. Which is also a problem.

Big companies can just disappear. Ask GEC. Or Pan Am. Or TWA. Or Woolworths. Or BHS. Or C&A ....

How is it possible to not let you collect your personal belongings? Did you not have a coat or other outerwear as well?

When I witnessed a manager being escorted out security stood by while he cleared his desk, taking care to rip down the Christmas decorations he had paid for! No way was he going to leave his vaping kit behind.

How is it possible to not let you collect your personal belongings?

The right to ones shit isn't absolute. I hope we all know the second part of a fire alarm ? Leave the building by the nearest emergency exit. Do not stop to collect personal belongings.

Usually if you are escorted out of the building immediately, while you are in the meeting security or similar will be clearing your personal possessions into a box which you'll be given. You do get your things back, but you are not allowed back to your desk on your own in case you take company information/hit the reset button on the IT system/take client contact details.

As loads of other posters have said, this is very normal in tech. It has happened to me at one tech start up - was put on 2 months gardening leave and had no absence in my employment record because you use that time to find another role. I have also been in confidential conversations with my next CEO about who were were going to lay off and how much we’d offer them just to go.

A PP said tech companies even publish a list of those being laid off - this is very true. At my current place, one of our main competitors has just laid off a third of its staff. Our VP of Talent Acquisition was in conversations with at least 8 of those people within a few hours.

It’s very common in start ups or mid market but I can imagine as a company grows to enterprise level, newer employees might not have had those same experiences, so it might be a shock to them.

I work in tech but not Twitter , read a website called blind ... lot of updates there

I have friends there and it's a total shot show

There are law suits popping up in literally every country his employees are in apparently over the way it's been rolled out

Twitter still has 300 million unique users daily. They also have the lowest revenue per employee of all the social media companies.

Elon isn't conventional. It will be interesting to see in a month what is happening with Twitter. People have sworn up and down they don't pay for all kinds of services and what not that started free and then added fees, and yet they have. He became a millionnaire at 27, a billionaire at 41, and is now worth 200 billion ten years later. Regardless of his lack of interpersonal skills or personal moral integrity, he gets shit done very successfully.