I too don't have much sympathy for them. Everyone knows that employment is at will for both employees and employer in most of the US. They all get a nice severance that gives them plenty of time to find new jobs which shouldn't be that hard for them.

Twitter is bloated and has been bleeding cash for too long.

> In its sixteen-year history, Twitter has only rarely been profitable. Over the past decade, its core features have barely changed, and its growth has been much slower than that of many competitors.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/twitter-is...

The Twitter employee gravy train is over. Time to pull your weight and be productive whether you stay at Twitter or move on.

For some reason I can’t help picturing you yelling this at your step-son and then popping a beer at the end. (Except the url, I guess… you’re not yelling that part in my weird little fantasy)

Yeah, that is a weird little fantasy.

Just for the record, I'm happily married, love my child very much and don't even drink. I was laid off when my wife was pregnant and did just fine. No hard feelings for that company at all. They had to do what they had to do.

The fantasy wasn't that weird. They drew a compelling scene that complemented the shocking lack of empathy in your comment.

Oh, sorry you're shocked and sorry I don't have sympathy for tech workers that have the education, skills and connections to find cushy jobs that pay at the top percentile of wage earners in the U.S.

I'll save my sympathy for the homeless, hungry and bottom percentile earners that work hard at an honest living and scrape by everyday trying to feed their families. Sorry that my sympathy is too limited for you.

"Empathy" has been overused in this industry to the point of meaninglessness and virtue signaling.

Something tells me you don’t actually have empathy for the homeless and hungry though..,

Something tells me your comment is totally baseless. I could make the same claim about you, one internet stranger to another, and it would be worth just as much, that is, zilch.

Fwiw, I've volunteered at homeless shelters, sleeping overnight and make it a point to give at least a buck and say an encouraging word to any homeless people that I pass by, not that a buck will make a drastic difference, but to let them know I'm not totally ignoring them.

This comment is completely uncalled for and unrelated to the conversation at hand.

I think on HN, I see same exact logic applied to Twitter employees with $300k compensation as to an Amazon warehouse worker getting paid $16/hour; i.e., labor rights above anything else.

The crowd here is blind to this circumstantial disparity. Another blind spot is if you replace $300k engineers getting laid off with $100k managers getting laid of at say IBM, the tide reverses, no more empathy for managers! How dare we!

Save your sympathy? Sympathy isn't a coin purse from which you judiciously spend and save. It's just a perspective on how you choose to view the world. You get to choose -- are you going to view the world from the perspective of people first, or from some other more grotesque perspective like their value as employees or contribution to the GDP.

It's the easiest thing in the world to both think "my heart goes out to these people who have been suddenly disconnected form their income" and also to have a focus on those more in need.

It's just figure of speech. The meaning in this case is I choose to have sympathy for those that are really down and out not rich tech workers.

The main reason I choose not to have sympathy for them is because they are rich (comparatively) tech workers.

The main drivers of sympathy (at least for me) are how well you know or identify with someone and how dire their situation is.

I don't know anyone personally in Ukraine, but they have all my sympathy because their situation is truly horrible.

Likewise, I don't know any of the laid off Twitter workers. But their situation is anything but dire or even bad. They might think it is, but objectively, it is not. It might turn out to be the best thing to happen in their life actually. So no sympathy there.

Look, your scope of sympathy is different that mine. Yours includes rich laid off tech workers and mine doesn't. I think that's ok. You're comfortable with your boundaries and I'm comfortable with mine. I don't think I'm a bad person for it. If you think so, you're 100% entitled to your opinion. Let's leave it at that.

It is crazy. The stock has been going sideways since the IPO [1], for a tech company during one of the most fertile and robust economic decades, Twitter's performance has been absolutely abysmal.

Twitter hasn't innovated, the whole thing has been running on autopilot since the IPO.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/ynnmx6zu

Compare with a company like Cloudflare that launches new products at a breathtaking pace, Twitter just seems so docile and unimpressive. Yes, I've spent thousands of dollars on their ad platform and it is a complete shitshow on the backstage too. Twitter's ad platform is a joke compared to Meta.

I feel bad for any employee that gets laid off, but to not see the problems in Twitter is being way too emotional and not very objective. Twitter needs a reboot. Those that stayed have a great future ahead.

The employees don't deserve basic human empathy because the company wasn't technically amazing and made no profit? In what twisted world view does that make any sense?

People literally celebrated the (illegal) destruction of my last job by Uber/Lyft because everyone has had at some point in their life a bad cab ride.

That one dude I pulled a knife on and then got arrested for being belligerent to the cops…top level customer service right there.

Nobody said that. These are not workers in poverty, they are making a significant amount of money and know the risks. There will be severance packages and they'll be hired elsewhere. This has happened to dozens of well known tech companies in the last few months. We're only focusing on musk because politics.

Literally the comment I responded to said that:

> Honestly I don't really care about Twitter employees. The company is not going exceptionally technically amazing...No idea how they were able to stay alive so long while turning loss after loss.

Anyways, this has nothing to do with Musk. I just think anybody losing their only source of income deserves basic empathy first, and I will happily call out comments that spin it as if they somehow deserved it bc they worked at twitter or weren't renowned for their engineering prowess.

90 days severance during the holidays.

VS

Staying and having to work long hours under Musk.

Maybe we have empathy for the wrong group…?

No not at all, but the severance package they're getting (pay until february) is not worthy of condemnation. By all means... they're getting a sweet deal. First, a high equity payout (since Musk overpaid by all accounts) and now a great severance. It's sad, but I find it distasteful they're seeking to be objects of sympathy.