This is full 'on fire' mode for Twitter. Even more people quit than Musk expected and he's terrified that people are going to start sabotaging the company. So he's shutting everything down which means if critical infrastructure has problems, Twitter's going to fall apart.
I just don't see how he didn't expect large numbers to take the severance? The deal he was offering was basically: If you want to work a lot of all-nighters and weekends with me then click 'yes', otherwise you'll get 3 months severance pay.
I disagree with the people (not specifically or only you) who are focusing on things like how employees may feel about Elon, how they should feel, and how they feel about his statements about the future of Twitter.
It seems like a striking lack of empathy, based on my experience with - certainly not the same situation, much more gradual - but a company in decline where people are deciding whether to jump ship.
When a place is screwed up and mismanaged, anybody intelligent prepares as best they can. And you don't put any stock in what leadership says because they're running the place into the ground in the first place! This always results in repeatedly broken promises, even if not as dramatic as with Twitter.
Most importantly, you don't allow any emotion towards the company or upper management to come into play if you know what's good for you. Your responsibility is to yourself, your family, your friends, and any other individuals you may care about. Nothing is more important than a rational assessment of your options.
The whole cult of personality (believing or rejecting) is just irrelevant in a real situation, in my universe.
I won't guess at how many people will in fact take the deal, but I think psychologically he greased the skids by making it "opt out", while also making it very rational to leave now.
Several comments I've seen say they would not quit yet, as it makes sense to draw things out while finding another job.
I think that ignores that obviously you can't count on anything, so choosing to end the chaos asap seems attractive. And if you quit now, there might be safety in numbers. Better to be part of a mass layoff that you don't need to explain why you left.
I guess the key point I want to make is that people may be underestimating the value of ending one's association right now, because smart, rational people tend to dislike open ended uncertainty and know what they don't know.
I agree with you, but even if they quit, I'm not sure there is a much certainty. From what I've read, no severance agreement was prepared for employees to review, so there is some question about the terms of severance.
It's unreasonable IMO to give people an ultimatum like this and not explain what either path will look like in practical, concrete terms. But the whole thing has been unreasonable so far.
Saw this game theory take on the situation on Mastodon which I think was quite on target:
"Elmo’s 5PM deadline was designed to make employees signal their type: High-effort employees can make big bonuses by staying; low-effort employees would be better off taking the severance rather than be fired for not meeting his standards.
But the deadline also put employees in an assurance game with each other, and ASSURANCE GAMES HAVE TWO EQUILIBRIA. In one, a critical mass commits. But in the other, everyone realizes that there is no point in committing since no one else is.
He's afraid that employees will sabotage the company because that's what he'd do, just like all other narcissistic psychopaths. I doubt many/any employees want to put their future in legal jeopardy for the lulz.
Why assume he's trying to save it and is completely incompetent, rather than trying to destroy it?
I see some people in denial that he's feeding Twitter into a woodchipper, and other people willfully ignoring all his past activities where he did not destroy companies.
Occam's razor says he is trying to liquidate it, because that's what he is doing. The objection to that, I think, is really just "why would he incinerate billions of dollars". Sometimes, though, you have to accept what you are seeing, no matter how crazy, and figure out what it implies.
It was thought that the Van Allen radiation belts should be lethal to humans, and the ultimate test was for astronauts to pass through them and survive. But eventually, doubters of the Moon landings reasoned that since the belts are lethal, the landings must be fake. You sort of have to prioritize your beliefs, otherwise you come to wildly different conclusions.
Elon appears to be ham-handedly binary searching for that answer. The problem is that if you go too low, things catch fire and there is nary a soul to put them out.
A more reasonable, emotionally mature individual would've taken time to develop the appropriate metrics to determine which employees were necessary, and which weren't, vs starting with the galacticly stupid approach of keeping the programmers which have written the most code in the past N days, and then following that up by giving generally well-off, easily re-employable, capable engineers an ultimatum, with a three month severance chaser. Who do you suppose is most likely to click that "yes" button? People who are not as easily re-employable.
I wouldn't be surprised if twitter has less than 10% of their best engineers left, with the remaining engineers being the lowest performers. And now those 10%'s lives are all the more difficult, meaning the majority will likely be showing themselves the door in the near future.
Nothing of that user share is just a simple web app.
Lots of moving parts to make that work. And it often takes a special person who’s been there long enough to know a peculiar infrastructure needed in part to make that happen.
You always hear about how these jobs pay a lot, well it’s not always the kinda sexy academic stuff you hear about on HN… A lot of spinning up and deploying services.
Exactly. At a different tech company, I was shocked how much of my team's effort went into configuring specific instances of cassandra and kafka clusters.
There are simple webapps, but as you scale up it completely changes.
> It's just a simple web app. How many people can it really take to run the thing?
Except it isn't? Content filtering and ranking based on properties such as individual preferences and localized content is way harder than dumping a SELECT * FROM tweets, not to mention compliance requirements.
