It only works because you allow yourself to sorely disrespect human beings, their livelihood and their feeling of safety.

A strategy that seems to be hot in the US, but is an utter ethical abomination and shameful.

That is sadly life in private sector for a majority of all workers.

Yeah, I mean that's pretty much at the core of Musk's (and Trump's) philosophy.

I thought that a reasonably free, vital, innovative, and prosperous society was compatible with a fundamental respect for human dignity. That's why I moved to Europe. Now it seems I was overoptimistic, but that doesn't mean we should wholly embrace backsliding right into the 19th century version of "progress".

It is the same reason I moved to Europe.

I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.

> I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.

A lot of folks mention the lower salaries in Europe (generally, and especially for tech): has mattered much in your (personal) experience for quality of life and happiness?

What imho matters more is culture. There is less of a salary, but a culture of safety and stability.

However, this is not for everyone: While you can be more sure of keeping your job in rough times, you can also be sure that the lazy idiot 2 desks over will keep his job. And you can be sure that any change will be resisted because change is seen as inherently bad and threatening, and reasons will be found to shoot down your new-fangled fancy ideas. YMMV, to each his own, etc.

For me, the lower salary has not affected my daily life too much. I saved a lot of money in the US, but now making about 100k between myself and my partner in the Netherlands, we are still living a comfortable life. We own a car, bought a house in 2024, and we are saving about 1k per month into various sinking funds with a net savings closer to 500/pm. No kids yet, but hopefully with raises and generous family leave policies, I think we will be okay.

My quality of life is insanely better. I live in a walkable small city in the south. I walk to the grocery store a few times a week. I bike to the library or to the train station. My job turns off at 5pm and I don’t work on the weekends unless I want to. Even then, that weekend work time can be substituted for work during the week.

The biggest downside for us has been the cost of traveling back to the US to see family. It’s very expensive for us to fly home since we also need to rent a car usually. Even saving 1k per month, that’s a significant part of the yearly savings just going to buy plane tickets for one big trip per year. After we have kids, I suspect grandma and grandpa will be coming here to visit more often because we can’t afford to fly with a family of 4 or 5 more than once every other year. Not to mention the tax implications of spending too much time abroad.

If you can afford to try it out, take a 90 day visa and just chill and see if the lifestyle works for you (including remote work). Worst case scenario, you go back to the US after a year if you hate it.

No. But it depends on they type of life you choose to lead.

I just wanted enough to buy a house and raise a family, and I could earn enough for this. A comfortable middle class life in a nice neighborhood.

I also appreciate the safety nets and worker protections here in Europe. I recently went through a serious medical condition that in the US would have me bankrupt. Here I had no issues.

Had I moved to the US I would by now be either dead or broke.

I took the "overoptimisim" to mean that the parent thought Europe could defend and maintain this outlook well into the forseeable future, an assumption that is being tested by Europe's own rightward slide. The way things are right now in Europe, to say that it might have been overoptimistic to think that Europe will continue as it has makes sense to me. At the moment, it is unclear to most people who live there how much of their way of life (if any) is subsidized by the US.

This is exactly what I meant, thank you. I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted.

Before the election, Vivek or Elon or one of the galaxy-brains floated the idea of firing every other employee in the federal government based on the last digit of their social security number.

The cruelty is the point.

There is a difference between cruelty and arbitrariness. It isn't cruelty.

They're going up against a world-class bureaucracy; a human powered machine that is excellent at dragging out changes beyond the term of any politician. Something like "Yes, Minister" is a comedy show except a lot of it is fairly true - they aren't going to get anything done without doing something drastic like cutting a lot of functions and seeing what happens. Otherwise it'll keep growing.

It’s not arbitrary, though. He’s attacking CFPB because he wants to launch financial features on Twitter without oversight. He’s attacking USAID because they helped end apartheid in his native South Africa. It’s really all just a bunch of petty vendettas and looting.

> It’s really all just a bunch of petty vendettas and looting.

Yeah. The technical term for that is "arbitrary". It isn't ideologically motivated; it is based on some dude's opinions based on who-knows-what internal dialogue. Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.

A financial institution created by the very person responsible for dismantling our most effective consumer protections against malicious financial institutions sounds like an extremely bad idea.

I'm very curious how anyone could think this is a good idea (for consumers, obviously it's a good idea for Musk)

You can't recognize DOGE as an extreme ideological endeavor simply because it aligns with your ideology.

No it’s not? “Arbitrary” would be if he were, like, picking names out of a hat, or the first one that he sees on Twitter in the morning. He’s attacking agencies for extremely personal and ideological reasons. Literally the opposite of arbitrary.

> Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.

Kind of a jaw-dropping reaction to the fact that he’s dismantling the very agency that would be in charge of regulating those features. Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.

> Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.

Seems like it should be easy to do. We're looking at this big corrupt blob thing of questionable competence that is the US political class, and then one polyp of the mass does something that probably makes the world a little better. Yay. Well done blob thing.

It'd be better if people committed to a high-integrity political class but it is a monumental task (probably multi-generational) and the people trying to progress it haven't made much progress. Suggestions welcome.

Is the "one polyp of mass that does something that probably makes the world a little better"… supposed to be DOGE? The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?

Like, are we not commenting on an article about how we recklessly fired dozens to hundreds of people who were overseeing our nuclear weapons stockpile? And it turned out they're actually really important, but we're having trouble contacting them to hire them back? And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?

I don't really know what to say, man. It's pretty clear this isn't going to go anywhere productive. Have a nice night.

> The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?

The last president was forced to issue multiple preemptive pardons for his own family after being dogged for years by serious corruption allegations. That probably counts as worse and it isn't even particularly outrageous by the standards of the US Congress, it seemed to be pretty routine stuff. I'd expect most members of the US congress to struggle if real scrutiny was bought to bear since their financial circumstances often don't appear to make sense.

Then beyond the personal corruption there is the lobbying network that constantly tries and succeeds in writing law for various unsavoury interest groups. Realistically if Musk is doing something corrupt - TBD in my opinion - his major mistake is being directly associated with the changes, he should have learned from the experts and done it discretely like everyone else does.

> And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?

You seem to have tapped into the mindset with this one. Say it again seriously and you've made it there.

As you mention "Yes, Minister", as a potential metaphor for truth...

That series was based on conversations between the writers and senior civil servants in UK Government. It was Margaret Thatcher's favourite show (she even wrote a scene to perform with the actors at some event or other), because in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it was incredibly on the money.

However, the more apt political comedy to reflect what modern politics looks like isn't "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister" (the sequel), but "The Thick of It", which shows well-meaning but put-upon civil servants dealing with the tyranny and abuse of special advisors and external consultants bullying and demeaning them at every turn. It, too, is based on conversations with real insiders in UK government.

I'll leave it to you to decide which is most apt for modern Washington, but there was a film of the latter mostly set in Washington, which tries to capture the tensions on that side of the Atlantic quite well, with the main joke being the UK's necessary subservience to a larger World power. It's worth a watch.

For my money, Musk looks a lot more like Malcolm Tucker than he does Jim Hacker.

I think being fair is the point. Instead of using any metric that might infringe on a protected class, let's use math?

(Curious what the last digit of Vivek's SS is.)

In another time it was called decimation, and was used as collective punishment.

Ah, thank you, I didn't know.

Seems like a stretch to compare executions and layoffs, no one else is immune to layoffs

The people deciding to execute layoffs are generally immune to those layoffs.

It was Vivek and his plan was to randomly (lottery) fire half of all federal employees the first year and then randomly fire half of those who remain the second year get to an overall 75% reduction.

Talk is cheap. These idiots.

at least it would be known when it starts and when it stops with this solution. the current 'audit' will take years....

Government employees shouldn't be immune to layoffs. If the government goes bankrupt, everyone is much worse off. The longer these systems stay down the worse things can go, this is the most humane way to do what needs to be done. Which is take away the power (money) that the parasitic relationship between business and DC is built on and make sure we don't go bankrupt.

They will be able to collect unemployment, do we know if they are getting severance?

This comment definitely appear to be written a bit too fast and with disregard to the context.

Firing is not an issue. The issue is fire to rehire.

It is not only indicative of poor leadership, but also does it break down institutions - one of the key values government provides.

to contextualize: Do you think you can get people to go to war for the US if you can not make up your mind on whether or not to keep them on payroll?

But we will see how the US will fare with broken down institutions.

I am aware that it is about the fire and rehire. If no one can say why something should exist, then yes, the quickest solution is turn it all off and see what breaks. You might not agree with it but it is a valid strategy given all the dynamics at play. Your definition of leadership isn't my definition.

I don't think we should go to war at all.

I don't think you understand why Trump was elected or middle America culture. The popular vote was a vote against deterring and corrupt institutions that already exist

Getting bureaucrats to fire each other is met with every delay tactic possible. Might be able to put it off for two years which is all they need.

Going in crazy like they are doing now, may serve the administration if they start having department do their own layoffs in a hurry, because they know otherwise it will be done for then.

You are immoral.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did the twitter employees come back at the same pay or did they ask for much more expensive packages since they'd been identified as crucial to operations?

Sounds like the kind of thing that could end up increasing costs rather than reducing them.

If it ends up being something like 80% non-crucial and stays fired, the other 20% return with double-pay, you’re probably still running a net-positive with better resource allocation

Except in reality the 20% coming back are probably not the best. Some will be but at least some of your best employees are going to be smart enough (or have enough self-respect) to go elsewhere. And/or those are the people skilled enough to find a new job quickly (or know they can find one quickly) and aren’t willing to come back.

I don't know about Twitter but for the companies I know of that have done this people generally can't vack for 1.5x to 2x their old pay.

It only "worked" because the key personnel decided to come back. Had they decided to move on to greener pastures, the end result would've been very different.

That isn't much of a point because federal employees are much more likely to return than Twitter technical staff. Interesting approach, specially because it's not my country.

>> federal employees are much more likely to return

Not necessarily. It's generally understood that federal employees accept a lower salary in exchange for career stability. If a career as a federal employee now has higher risk then at least some people will be expecting a higher salary.

The advocates of Musk's firings will say that if these people could command a higher salary, they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.

> […] they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.

In this particular case, the government positions were maintaining the US's nuclear arsenal. Not sure how "wasteful" having a nuclear deterrent is.

Could we privatize the arsenal to increase efficiency?

If you're not joking: what private entity would you trust to not start WW3?

The profit-making part is when we pull back from being world policeman and instead sell nuclear weapons and weapon systems. Sorry, we won't go to war for you, but how about some H-bombs, Taiwan?

We're really going to pull a Cuban Missle Crisis again? but x10? I guess they'll be cheered on this time.

Government work is literally goods and services for the population.

This is some serious 1984 war is peace shit.

Thankfully this isn't the case or you would get the least talented people in government, making it even more ineffective and wasteful.

I think that incentive is part of the problem. Federal employees should get paid more with a reasonable expectation of being fired. The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.

How is firing large amounts of people on a whim going to solve the problem of people not caring about their work?

From what it sounds like (w.r.t Project 47/2025) DOGE is fund seeking for massive planned programs, not returning money to the citizenry or restructuring for efficiency.

It sounds like they are illegally looting agencies and programs that congress already funded, so they can fund the admin's proposed plans (virtual social cleansing, mass deportations, homeless relocation, freedom cities, etc).

It doesn't look like DOGE is trying to fund anything; at this stage my guess is they're trying to hack off the propaganda arm of the CIA/NSA and the web of NGOs on the theory that it is funding anti-Trump messaging. Otherwise targeting USAID for savings early is a bit pointless; what is $50 billion a year to the US government? They're $36 trillion in debt with no plausible path out of the hole. Annual deficit is around $2 trillion.

Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.

There are some hints toward this, like with recent reporting :

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap...

> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said

---

Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).

It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.

I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.

The problem here is that gilt rates have been on the rise for a year (most likely as a reaction to Trump's manifesto), meaning borrowing is getting more and more expensive. You can print more money, but that devalues the currency, which the USD has managed to shirk off by being the main reserve currency of the planet. Except, that might change soon - because of the seeming chaos of the Trump administration (based on experiences of the previous administration), people are eyeing up EUR as a safer place, and gold prices are moving in a direction that suggests people want out of dollars (even if gold is normally denominated in USD for most people).

Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.

If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.

I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.

I made this comment before digging deeper into appropriations impoundment.

However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.

Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:

https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-overlooked-conundrums-of-imp...

Most likely the whole point is to destabilise and eliminate government structures with the goal of filling the resulting power vacuum with privately owned services. That's what Thiel and his ilk are all about.

The first part of this plan - destruction - is easier than the second half - creation. If they're successful with the second half, people will be worse off because it's a big step towards neofeudalism /strengthening oligarchy. If they fail, people will be a lot worse off because the structures they're destroying are actually doing important work.

> it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy

this. the optics are important for the Trump base

>Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.

They want to fund corporate tax cuts. the cut from 22 to 15 percent is estsimated to be worth 100-200b dollars of income for the government per year. That's about the yearly funding of the DoED.

So we aren't saving money nor paying off debt. we are just funding corporate profits.

None of these people were let go because of the quality of their work. What incentive would they have to do their job well if their continued employment is not based on merit?

They don't get paid more because the government is not a profit center. It gets money from the citizens and then appropriates those funds. raises and promotions need to be a strict process because all government workers have public salaries. They can probably pay a little more, but not anything close to competitive.

>The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.

blame the incentive structure, not the players. Government being efficient and saving money results in less budget next time. They are punished for their improvement. If Musk wanted governent efficiency, that's the angle to approach. Protecting against lower budgets after a high performance review would do wonders.

The problem with ongoing US "experiments" is how much the rest of the planet is dependent on American companies, related economics and politics, regardless of it not being our country, the schockwaves will be felt.

And this is the thing, the rest of the world has agreed to be dependent on American companies, because they believed in the legitimacy of the US and free international trade. If belief in that legitimacy goes away, we will see that dependence shift quickly. Let us begin with Mastercard and Visa where the US taxes every payment transaction in much of the world. Do we really believe that Europe couldn't run its own card schemes?

The European Payment Initiative, the EPI, abandoned its plans for a card scheme and decided to focus on an account-to-account instant payment solution (A2A) for all kinds of use cases, all through a wallet. There is an interesting synergy here with the European moves to develop a common digital identity service and euro-wallet infrastructure.

They're not just trying to get rid of the US middleman, but the middleman altogether.

Starting with this year, Germany has legally mandated free and instant (few seconds) direct account to account transfers. For some shops, you can now either pay by SEPA (for free) or agree to pay a 3% fee for using VISA. They already started cutting out the US middleman.

IMO, to me as layman non-American, it's not an if. The USA is done-for-except-not, just like Twitter has been for a while. This might be able to be undone, hypothetically, but is not being undone. Online armchair generals are already starting to discuss things like escalation strategy for European nuclear forces and so on.

I guess we'll be seeing Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads phenomenon across worlds, both horizontally and vertically in the coming decades, this time in real life with (more)real consequences.

There's going to be major efforts especially in Europe, to de-couple from the US. We saw this to some extent in Trump 1.0 but he didn't actually do much due to the ineptness of those around him and a Senate that was still dominated by the anti-MAGA GOP "old guard". This time it is much, much worse.

> Had they decided to move on

Why didn't they?

H1B

What a giant scam the whole program is. Corporations need a good finding out phase again

All key personnel were immigrants? Why did the others come back? Also, since the H1B were key to operations and therefore smart, couldn't at least some of them have found a new employer? 61% of the H1B population switched jobs that year, so why did all key H1B come back?

I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.

With h1b i think you have 60 days to find someone else to sponsor you or you have to leave the country. 60 days is no time at all to find and start a new job. Even if you’re smart.

Even in the best markets, I still had a 6 week interview to offer stage (5 stages). 45 days and if they decided someone else is better I may be out of luck restarting the process.

With a Visa, I would not take such a risk. Given the job market, they either need to extend the period, or somehow mandate companies decide on a full time candidate within 30 days of first conact. It's gotten beyond out of hand.

I don't live there, but weren't other tech companies laying off at a similar time?

Right, but that's all Musk sees: they came back, and so it worked. He seems like the kind of person whose ego would make him believe that any other time he tries this, it would work too.

I'm still waiting for file upload API v2. V1 was only made EOL like what, 9 months ago.. Its totally fine to gut your company when all you need is maintenance mode.

America won’t even have maintenance mode when these guys are done. Except for the billionaires.

Clearly you have no regard for people and their needs. I hope one day you find yourself in a similar situation, fired for no reason other than some billionaires selfish reasons and desire to increase his wealth and it impacts you greatly. Maybe then you will see that what you wrote was idiotic. Though unlikely from a tech bro and elon lover like yourself

A difference with government is that you and I pay the salaries of these people. With Twitter a lot of it was just schadenfreude. Many of the employees were acting in a way perceived to be partisan and vindictive, which left a rather sizable number of people somewhat less than upset when the tide turned.

It's one reason we should all endeavor to treat each other, perhaps especially those we disagree with, with some degree of respect - even if your sole and only motivation is your own interests.

If a company gets too big, its not the employees fault, why should they be the first on the chopping block? If a government is too big, is it again the employees fault? Or is it someone elses?

The concept that some dude with more money than another can make screwups, then happily go off and impact thousands of lives thinking this is the way forward with no impact on them is utterly mind boggling. Similarly, we, the people who pay the salaries of government employees, are the ones who are at fault for voting in people who keep making mistakes. So why should the employees be suffering for this?

Do people not realise all of this is a smoke screen to push attention away from the conversation that existed to tax billionaires? To make them pay their fair share? This has all been nothing but an act to divert attention away. And its working. We are arguing about nothing when the solution is so obvious.

The people that should suffer are the ones in control. Not the ones who just want to live day to day.

Employees with zero to negative productivity should be on the chopping block because we want the employer to survive.

The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?

Do you really believe that your second sentence is true? wow. So what you are saying is that billionaires, while they do pay taxes, pay their fair share with no attempt to avoid taxes? No overseas accounts or shady businesses? Its all above board?

But anyway, lets focus on the low productive people, because that really what is going to bring America out of the rut that it is in. Not the overly powerful rich that are totally screwing the regular joe. You're on another planet bro if you think the problem is the low productivity person and thats what America needs to focus on right now.

The main way taxes are avoided is by a lot of their wealth being paper wealth. For Bezos that's Amazon stock, for Musk it's Tesla. So when the stock doubles in price, so does (nearly) their net worth. But they're not taxed on this until they convert it to cash. So they can see their wealth double or triple with 0 increase in paid taxes, unless they try to access that money.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is possible, but it's not clear how you'd do this without destroying the entire financial (as opposed to goods/services) economy, since taxing 'wins' without crediting 'losses' makes any margins-game like investing impossible, but billionaires receiving billions of dollars in refunds when the market crashes is probably not visually great. It also seems fairly certain you'd introduce investment hedge possibilities with this, which is also probably undesirable. Not an easy problem.

And of course on top of all of this there's the Norway Problem. [1] Norway decided to introduce a hugely unpopular increase to their wealth tax system. It was expected to increase government revenue by about $146 million per year. Instead it resulted in a loss of about $448 million per year. Make taxation sufficiently onerous and people will simply leave your country. We're not talking about a captive audience, especially in modern times.

[1] - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2024/09/11/the-failure-of-norw...

Certainly I do. I'd like the United States to change to a simpler and more regressive tax policy so that everyone has skin in the game. For example, eliminating all taxes in favor of a VAT or the like.

You live in a fantasy world. If thats what you think is the core problem right now in America or what needs to be focused on, good luck buddy!

Were it trivial to attribute the performance of complex systems to individuals, they would have no need to seek employment at firms and would be able to get the fair value for their labor in an efficient market.

And what if it turns out that let's say 70% of individuals have a zero to even slightly negative 'value', as seems increasingly possible as organizations shed mass numbers of employees but continue to function just fine? Or we can look at evidence in the other direction where you have companies taking on dramatically more employees yet not showing anywhere near proportional increases in 'productivity' (which I'm using as as a catch-all rather than as the precise term).

I really think this is the future many people behind evangelization of e.g. "AGI" futures are aiming for, with the assumption that well then we'd just have to create some sort of a basic income and everybody would live happily ever after. Of course that rather voluntarily chooses to ignore centuries of evidence to the fact that that's probably not quite what would happen. And even if it did, instead of everybody living happily every you'd instead create a dramatic stratification in society that would, over time, come to make Feudalism look like Communism. People that live only to consume will, over time, come to be marginalized with 100% certainty.

It's definitely a worry I have!

You have provided no evidence that the fired employees provided zero productivity.

Firing thousands of people should not be the decision of one unelected man. Congress funded those agencies congress has to defund them.

The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes. The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.

> The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes.

This is objectively false [1].

> The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.

This statement is a very different one than the previous and it’s expected since there’s no wealth tax.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

It is objectively false in the same sense it is 'false' to suggest renters pay property tax.

They don't sign the check, but the costs of tax burdens are often captured in the prices of goods/services offered by rich company owners.

They are not supporting the decision in this comment, they are just pointing out that Elon had a positive experience with the twitter layoffs which led him to want to run that playbook again. I would even venture the guess that they DONT support Elon's decision here.

It takes pretty advance level of self deception to frame "loosing money" as "positive experience".

Another perspective on that is if some highly-ranked agent may do so, maybe the system itself is wrong. This is basically allowed and works. Why someone who remains in practically legal limits to blame if clearly your ideas are based on morals and not these limits?

I’m not justifying him here, it just seems naive to make the rules which produce (and most of the times promote) ones like that and then blame them for doing what’s effing effective within it. I mean, as a hi-tech american(?) you’re eating a cake baked in the same oven. Maybe it wouldn’t be as tasty if the oven had different settings, and you’d have different life experiences and opinion then.

This is horribly naive. It’s not twitter. There are safety outcomes which need to be considered in safety critical agencies.

I mean can you even claim to make the assumption that the actual key staff were rehired? Can you make the assumption that they are working safely with the resources they need? Can you make an assumption that they have covered the entire scope of the organisation?

Probably not.

Chess is played one piece at a time, not smashing all the pieces off the board.

Unless you are playing against a selfish child who can't bear to lose.

Move fast and break the nuclear weapon arsenal.

Move fast and break the nuclear weapons arsenal.

edit: OK, so parent edited to match what I wrote and now I'm being downvoted because I look like I copied parent?

I am being downvoted too if that’s any consolation

Well, now I upvoted you because now I feel sorry for you for some reason!

Did it work? Is Twitter profitable now?

No.

Maybe? They went private so that's not a good sign usually.

There's more of a surge on wall street, but similar to tesla a lot of this is upheld by an undeserved hype. If Elon Musk died, I suspect these valuations would plummet harder than '29. TSLA is informally called a meme stock for a reason.

Makes sense. And isn't this the ol' military trick, that in software dev / project management parlance is now called a "scream test"? I.e. if your unit feels like it's doing nothing but endlessly filling out all kinds of reports, and no one knows which ones are important, the solution is to stop submitting any reports at all - and wait until calls and angry letters from higher-ups begin. That will quickly reveal which reports you need to keep filing, and which you can ignore.

The Scream test is very valuable for time efficiency, in general. In this application though, I think they’re realizing sometimes it’s difficult to reverse, such as firing the new blood who just moved to DC and have been there only a year… like I would feel so abused, why go back?

If they tell you it was a scream test, and it turns out your team was actually pretty important and also gives you a raise, you might. Especially if you have nothing else lined up.

And especially if you're not a tech worker, so you can't exactly chill out and wait for a better gig to fall on your lap.

(Though recently, even in tech changing jobs is much more precarious than it ever was.)

Yeah that's the thing, the government can't unilaterally give raises like that. reason #20 this was a horrible move.

>Especially if you have nothing else lined up.

Sadly, yes. I do find the irony here that the FEDS said the economy was recovering and Trump promised to fix inflation and make jobs. Then he's taking advantsge of the bad market to force people he abused back.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I spent a dollar, because then, I'd have all my money back

Yes, using this tactic in the govt is much riskier than a private company. And we won't know in this case if it "works" until after many months. And then deciding whether it "works" is very subjective depending on whether the collateral damage on human lives is acceptable or not.

Yes, and the personnel rapidly identified that their new boss is a jerk that has no respect to their work and their life, so why should they work for him, when any boss in random fastfood is probably more capable to their job better that this one idiot, plus private sector pays more...

That's like popping your tires to figure out that you need them for driving, and then discovering there is only one spare in the trunk.

Valid point, but Twitter's development post acquisition stalled and the company was massively devalued, so I'm not sure that can be considered a positive case.

The point was never to turn it into a profitable venture, but to acquire a widely adopted and established communication channel, turn it into an echo chamber and make it run with the least cost possible. It became what was expected of it.

There's a big difference between a website that shows you posts, and the federal government.

Degrade the service of a website, and maybe it loads a little funny; degrade the services of a government and people die.

>Rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors.

This doesn't make sense to me. The federal government isn't a company making Widget X, where you can gut, tweak, and repair it until you minimize the cost per widget and maximize the number of widgets sold. The government does a lot of things, often in the hopes of results in one or more decades, and there's rarely an easy and immediate way to measure success.

For example, the Surgeon General announced tobacco's link with cancer in 1964. It wasn't until the 1990s that smoking rates really started to fall in any significant way. The federal and state governments have spent decades and billions of dollars to reduce smoking rates, and they've been wildly successful. The tax revenue generated by any person-years alive which were won through that effort will never make up for the billions spent. But those people will contribute more to the economic and social life of the US, and the tobacco settlement deterred other companies from causing so much harm.

"works" implies that they are able to a) find those personnel and b) win them back over. It seems like they shokingly cannot do either.

It's also still weird because a lot of the firings focused on probationary workers.Very few would prove themselves in a year, so they did have to defer to key personell in he end to figure out "hey, he needed those people". Except he may not get those worers back.

> but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.

Sure, positve for his ego. He didn't care about recovering the supercharger conractors, he didn't care about repairing his adverts' relationships on Twitter and even threatened to sue as if they are obligated to advertise on his plaform. Call me treachorous but I don't think he really cares about making an efficient government. He's just funding his tax cuts.