Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. I'm certainly curious where this all is going.

I wonder how many his employees in Tesla/SpaceX/where ever are currently incentivised by stock options, who’d watch their boss doing that to Twitter people and wonder why they bother working evenings and weekends, if the options can be yanked as cruelly as that?

Also, because of being outmaneuvered, he may be seeking any chance to stick his finger in the eye of the people who did it. That the logical consequences will be that his finger gets cut off... well, as I said, I'm not sold on his foresight at the moment.

Elon is interacting and trying to dodge this act. He seems to want to cut Twitter's workforce at a scale that the WARN act covers.

There's the WARN Act, but I don't think that impacts what happens after a duly-warned layoff, unless I'm mistaken?

Technically the company can't get around the WARN act through severance but it is essentially pre-paying the damages so there's no reason to go to court.

If your colleagues gets fired for some bs reason you and your other colleagues can stand for each other by striking.

That's because unions are an integral part of the way many of the countries socio-political systems work. In Norway, for instance, the trades unions and the employers get together once a year to hammer out what is called tarriflønn, essentially the going rate for each broad type of job. The state provides a referee for the meetings whose job is to keep them on track and to encourage both sides to compromise. Unions and companies work together rather than fight each other, most of the time.

But this can only work if there is a broad consensus that we are all in the same boat and that we will all be better off if we work together.

The attitude, that appears to be common, in the US that employers are always exploitative, employees are always lazy and thieving, that the government is just a parasite, and that the aphorism "Good enough for government work" is a synonym for delivering shoddy work means that no one trusts anyone so you end up fighting all the time.

On a side note, what happens to health insurance for employees who're let go? Does it end the time of your last day or midnight? I was too afraid to Google it as I likely knew it's be pretty cut throat, but have always stressed about it regardless.

Fire for cause means "you aren't doing your job properly."

Redundancy means "your job is no longer required."

If twitter restructures to save money, the jobs that no longer exist have been made redundant.

Maybe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make?

In US usage, the general term here is “layoff”. And severance is not a legal requirement, and practices vary considerably by industry and, within industries, by individual firm. Layoff is eligible for unemployment, while firing may or may not be. (The line is also looser because the US has at-will employment, so there are very little general rules–other than those in particular employment contracts of unionized or high-status employees–around termination other than for prohibited purposes, or–mostly around warning periods–mass terminations, but there are conditions for unemployment assistance.)

The downside of employee protections is that it makes companies more reluctant to hire. And also once hired, the salary to be offered is reduced to cover the estimated current value of the future employee protections. These are real downsides, particularly for young people who are trying to get a foot into the corporate ladder.

I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)

So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.

Employee protection exists because there's a huge power imbalance. A company who can constantly just say, "we'll fire you if this doesn't get done" and colludes with other companies on such matters makes it very difficult for workers. This is why employee protection, unions, etc... exist.

Nothing comes for free.

I wouldn't, but being in a country with employee protections means the people around me are almost never placed in a desparate situation, and I am meaningfully safer because of that.

People should save for a rainy day, anyway. Why must the employer be their parents?

I don't buy the idea that people in a free country like the US somehow found the one and only job they could ever have.

It's inevitable.

And when people get desperate some turn to crime. Which then increases your costs through increased taxation for policing and incarceration and secondary effects such as reduced safety and increased personal costs due to crime, such as increased insurance costs and the greater threat of being targeted.

So when all costs are internalized, worker protections pay dividends at making a society better for all involved, for example the many northers European countries with very low crime and very strong worker protections.

"Extreme"? What nonsense. I know many middle class people who don't have a spare $400 for an emergency. They also have a boat in the driveway. They don't have an income problem, they have a spending problem.

> And when people get desperate some turn to crime.

Or sell the boat. I remember one couple I counselled that couldn't pay the rent, but had a new car. I suggested they sell that, and buy one they could afford. I was surprised to find out that's just what they did.

It's not a poverty problem, it's a financial management problem. Don't conflate that with being actually poor.

> when people get desperate some turn to crime.

Crime causes poverty, not the other way around.

The downside to treating employees like children is a lower standard of living.

As to finding another job: of course they will, but switching costs are pretty high for job changes.

This kind of directly speaks to the commenters point. There may have “little good”, but enough reason until the legal change to increase employee protections created “no good reason”.

People use the same argument to justify removing minimum working age laws, weekend laws, OSHA laws, EPA protections, retirement, healthcare etc.

In a pure unregulated market, employers would be able to offer employees much higher salaries!

The reality is somewhere in the middle. Though what America thinks is reasonable is very different than what the rest of the developed world thinks is.

Maybe not, but the world isn't zero-sum. Some things really do raise or lower the overall average.

> I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)

What was the law change? And how long would it have been before those employees were laid off otherwise? That's an interesting datapoint to hear about, but "employee protections" can mean many different things.

> So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.

Unfortunately you don't get to skip out on the hidden downsides of at will either.

The 2008 financial crisis had left the company in a position where it needed to downsize anyways, and the board of directors gave the CEO the choice between covering that liability by making the US layoff bigger, or avoiding the extra liability by getting rid of basically the whole Argentinian operation. The CEO chose to preserve US jobs.

The Argentinian operation would have seen a layoff either way. But nowhere near as dramatic as the one that actually happened.

At-will is a huge risk for the individual, since they're going from roughly 100 % employment to 0 % employment.

On the other hand, in a decently sized organisation (where employee protection is typically enforced), being stuck with a bad employee and asking them for meaningless work that bothers nobody else means paying for 100 % capacity and only getting, say, 94 % of it. Over a large number of employees, the organisation can be fairly confident of what this percentage will be. Much smaller risk.

In other words, the utility cost for the employer of employee protection is smaller than the utility cost of at-will for the individual.

(Homeowner's insurance is a similar type of situation. Makes no sense to the individual if you look at the dollar costs, but in terms of utiles it does actually work out for both parties in most cases. Another case is hedging major business expenses -- costs more, but you and the counterparty both lose fewer utiles from it.)

Yep, that why software engineers in California and New York, where there are a lot of employee protections, don't get paid as much as SWEs in the Midwest or the South, where there are less... Right?

Or maybe the real economy is more complex than the kiddie models you were taught in Econ 101?

Innovation hubs move. Historically, this has always been true. Right now those are SV and NY.

It won't remain so.

Innovation hubs have been in China, Middle East, Venice, London, etc.

The printing innovation lasted around 300 years. Steam engine another 150 years. The industrial revolution less than 100.

How long do you think computers will dominate major innovation? And if it does, will the innovation hub stay in SV ?

What happens if biotech takes over? MRNA tech ? Driverless cars ? VTOL ? Rocketry or Space Tourism ? ML or low-code apps changing the dev of software as we know it today ?

Do you see any of those hubs in SV ? Are they in SV today ?

Regardless: yes, all of these things are in SV today. If any of them proves to revolutionize society in our lifetime I think you'll find SV will retain its status.

My only note it is that isn’t 40 years. For SV it’s more like 60 years (going back to the founding of Fairchild) or even longer if you want to go back as far as HP and other radio shops.

For NYC, it’s even longer. IBM has had a major NYC presence since at least the 30s (and obviously its main HQ is less than 40 miles from midtown)! Bell Labs/AT&T was based in Manhattan before moving to New Jersey and obviously is still in the NYC are. And that goes back to the 20s I think.

Not to mention other NYC and NYC adjacent companies like GE. So we’re going back 100 years or more for NYC and 80 for SV.

Xerox’s history combines both areas.

And as you said, Texas has a strong history too with the Motorola stuff and Silicon Prairie.

Historically speaking, Seattle is a relatively new entrant in computing and innovation, only really being a hub for 40 years or so (unless you count Boeing and then it back over 100 years), but is the home of two of the biggest companies of the last 50 years, Microsoft and Amazon.

Dozens and dozens of cities all over the world have tried to be the Silicon Valley of X and none have succeeded. And New York is extremely unique as a global center in dozens of different industries from finance to media to fashion to the arts.

Obviously things could be disrupted. But both of these areas have been innovation hubs for over 100 years, which given the short history of this country, is remarkable.

Both are at will states. So easy to hire, easy to fire.

When California says you can fire an employee for any reason, what they really mean is any reason except for a bunch of reasons we've decided are unacceptable.

You can still see this in many developing countries, children on assembly lines in China, or how a clothing factory in Bangladesh caved in killing most women working there.

TANSTAAFL is obviously and demonstrably false - child labour leaves them without education and traps them in poverty. Their creativity and future potential is lost to society. Employees without hands are an obvious loss to society. But the employer doesn't care, he saved a few bucks on safety. He isn't paying the cost. This argument further extends to education and beyond.

The argument of TANSTAAFL was used by coal companies in the 1920's. At the time they used to hire assassins to murder Union leaders and even killed the local sheriff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg9xywAxb10

This also sometimes happens in developing nations today, sometimes at the behest of western companies.

This is a fallacy. Companies will pay employees as little as possible. Why would they pay you more just because employee protections were removed?

And vice versa… if multiple companies want that resource.. they all have 20% more to bid with

No, you're thinking of a restricted version of the second definition from Merriam-Webster, while it was clearly the first definition that was meant.

precedent. noun

1. an earlier occurrence of something similar

2. a : something done or said that may serve as an example or rule to authorize or justify a subsequent act of the same or an analogous kind a verdict that had no precedent b : the convention established by such a precedent or by long practice

The "has" makes it seem like it was a legal statement. It probably should be been worded differently

"...so that's a precedent that shows that Musk is willing/has done something like this"

Those that remained productive will probably have better prospects for keeping their jobs, and for suing if they're fired.

To a first approximation I would guess 0.

When a company is teetering on calamity, people don't just stop doing things, they just stop doing things in organized, co-ordinated ways.

More than that, firing people for cause usually requires records and a demonstration of dialog the the person (not all jurisdictions) and is hard to demonstrate.

I think a lot of software engineers get too comfortable with the idea that meetings are deliverables - they aren't; meetings are coordination and planning. if nobody completes the work that was coordinated and planned, the meeting was nothing but a waste of time. Depending on your seniority as an engineer, you may have written code to decide that the work should be done, or you may be tasked with writing code to carry out the plan. If you're an engineer and you're not writing code on either side of meetings, you should dig deep and figure out why.

Sometimes a great engineer spends a month tracking down a 3-line fix, and that’s just what happens with complex software. But by and large, if an engineer averages only a few LOC a month (and I’ve unfortunately seen this way too many times) then we probably have a problem on our hands.

How do the individual stats look at the end of the month/quarter/Musk Layoff Review Period when these kinds of days are relatively common?

It does, however, bring up the point that one should always be mindful of what their output looks like and how easy it is to prove. I'm sure everyone has worked with a 'meeting commando', who loves to discuss edge cases and bikeshed instead of shipping code. Maybe they've carved out a nice niche doing so, and have convinced others in the company of their (dubious) value, but it shouldn't be surprising when the company is sold/acquired/RIFd that someone else might expect someone with an engineering title to have more tangible contributions to point to.

You're severely overstating it. The difference between 500 loc and 5000 loc isn't a clear signal of anything. But zero lines of code certainly is. Firing people because the VCS shows they stopped working is common.

I have no stake in the matter. My supposition that some employees simply stopped working comes from my experience seeing similar things happen at other companies during periods of uncertainty, and from my knowledge that quite a few twitter employees were very uncertain about their future with twitter.

Should I be fired?

You can do -100. You can do 100. You can net zero from 100 adds and 100 subtracts (abs=200). But it’s something. If you have long stretches of zero that’s not good.

But I hope they have something productive to show for the other 20 odd days that month they collected their paycheque for…

not everything is committed in a VCS: you have documentation, architecture, RFC etc etc depending on the size of the company and seniority of the employee.

I don’t think it’s an absolute rule that no commits means someone isn’t developing. But it’s probably a reason to have a conversation.

The only parties being cited as fired for cause are the outgoing executives, and WaPo article at the top of this post provides reasons for that.

I think this might be the confusing part, because he's trying to claw back as much compensation as possible, maybe he's trying to avoid paying severance as well

Elsewhere in this thread, people are discussing a potentially-credible (but maybe you disagree) report on this from Gergely Orosz that does not paint this as "only the 3 senior executives".

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1587042365084209153

> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.

What I'm trying to wade through is the vast oceans of nonsense being fielded in the media and in comments that do not add anything to the story and are just trying to prop up one side or another. There's an ocean of difference between one item of hearsay that you point out (hell, maybe that one EM was due to be fired "for cause" who knows? do you? I sure don't!), and 25% of the workforce being fired "for cause", and 4 executives (not 3 as you point out).

This is an oxymoron, so either the tweeter or the manager have no idea what he is talking about.

And the WaPo article states: “ The first round of layoffs, led by his lawyer Alex Spiro, will target 25 percent of the workforce”

It wouldn't because we're in a downturn and Twitter was already planning layoffs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement

Or much more likely you give them 2-3 months severance which is basically the same as saying "you are laid off in 60 days, don't bother coming back to work". Technically they would be breaking the law but the severance would count against the damages under the WARN act so there's no reason to go to court about it.

EDIT: You might have to file with an elected official actually, the website is a bit unclear: https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title29/cha...

§2102. Notice required before plant closings and mass layoffs

(a) Notice to employees, State dislocated worker units, and local governments

An employer shall not order a plant closing or mass layoff until the end of a 60-day period after the employer serves written notice of such an order—

(1) to each representative of the affected employees as of the time of the notice or, if there is no such representative at that time, to each affected employee; and

(2) to the State or entity designated by the State to carry out rapid response activities under section 3174(a)(2)(A) of this title, and the chief elected official of the unit of local government within which such closing or layoff is to occur.

If there is more than one such unit, the unit of local government which the employer shall notify is the unit of local government to which the employer pays the highest taxes for the year preceding the year for which the determination is made.

Tesla filed 3 WARN notices in California in July so Musk or Musk’s lawyers at least know how to file them.

From what I understand, Twitter’s standard terms of severance allow for two months salary and benefits and some sort of accelerated vesting towards the next quarter. That’s been the big question for employees because they vest quarterly (though each person could have a different vest date) and the terms of the acquisition were that RSUs were converted to cash to be paid out on the vest schedule. Some in the press speculated that Musk was trying to avoid paying our November 1 vests by firing early, but given that you’d need a WARN notice anyway, that wouldn’t prevent anything. If there was an accelerated vest you missed by a few days, that might be something that could be avoided, but I don’t know.

Still, even if you are paying out two months of benefits and salary (and potentially maybe even more, with accelerated vesting), that doesn’t mean a company doesn’t have to file a WARN notice.

And with the expected figures being 25% of employees (~1800 people), that figure would qualify as a mass layoff by federal definition, irrespective of the company’s total size, and irrespective of the 50 or 100 per site thresholds that are true for specific states.

Their CEO told them no layoffs were planned in the immediate future just a few months ago.

Why would this be? Musk has already signaled his lack of confidence in the previous management, why would this not extend to their hiring practices, training, HR policies, etc.?

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1587042365084209153?...

> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.

Its still a sad occasion to see them fired for no/little reason.

Also one perennial observation with authoritarian-friendly people is that in their dog-eat-dog fantasy they are the badass warlord sitting atop a pile of bones rather than the nameless goon that lies at the bottom of the bonepile.

That said, should Twitter eventually fall apart it will never be the fault of Musk. It will be because insiders preventing his vision, or the government blocked him, or any number of excuses.

Musk doesn't meet the cause outlined in their employment contracts. They'll get their executive early termination severance but it'll require some legal action first.

Do they even have employment contracts?

Does this mean that they have or deserve different rights under contract law than others do? What if their counterparty is even less "strapped for cash"?

Both are injustices. The former isn’t much of a risk to life. The latter could literally result in life or death situations.

If someone has 10 lollipops and loses 1, that’s not “selective empathy” to feel differently than about someone else who has 1 lollipop and loses everything.

Now, at some level, it still stinks that the CEO is getting paid so many tens of millions of dollars for less than a year's worth of work. To solve that, you'd have to cut CEO pay in the first place, because just removing the parachute would incentivize clinging to their existing paychecks.

I had reports from friends who worked there that they were asked to stay available over the weekend, presumably for situations like this, or requests from the "war room" group that has been setup.

One of the things Elon said was that there appears to be 3 managers for every engineer. I understand the need for a few PMs but if there really was a 3:1 ratio that’s just absurd.

Maybe more interesting, there are a lot of roles that have "manager" in the name somehow. Product Manager is the obvious one, Program Managers exist, and I'm sure there are others, not to mention that every function has managers in one shape or form if they're at all scaled out -- there's managers for designers, lawyers, accountants, etc at a fairly predictable ratio at every company I've worked at.

Amusingly, Twitter was one of the most manager-lite companies I ever worked at when I started. In 2011 the ratio was a lot closer to 50:1 than it was 1:10.

Perhaps Musk is simply taking everyone with manager in their role and implying they're managing other people. This is not the case and is willfully misrepresenting people's work if so. Par for the course for this guy, though.

Closing the sarcasm, yes, layoffs have costs (various costs, including to the morale), but there are reasons why organisations do them anyways.

The "for cause" bit is a transparently vindictive breach of contract. They will get their money and then some. In fact they may know some lawyers who know how to take Elon's money.

So, really those two long sentences should be rewritten:

Mr Agrawal, as an officer of the company, engaged in rampant speculation, perhaps to reassure employees (or himself) that their jobs were safe for three months to a year, even though Mr. Musk had repeatedly indicated otherwise.

2 - Depending on size of company and location, mass layoffs mean a ton of people looking for jobs at the same time.

Better to get ahead of such things, in my experience.

I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are engaged in wishful thinking, rather than deceit.