Musk fired about 50 Twitter engineers last night (happy Thanksgiving!) and sent warnings to others

[highplainsdem]

So much for the claim that the layoffs were over...

Threads below from Alex Heath of the Verge and Zoe Schiffer of Platformer:

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

On the evening before Thanksgiving, some Twitter engineers received an email saying they were fired because their “code is not satisfactory.” Others received “performance warning” emails asking them to “restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team”


On Tuesday, Twitter’s remaining engineers were told they had to send “code samples” via email every week.

Engineers who were fired via email this evening are being offered 4 weeks of pay in exchange for signing a separation agreement and release of claims.


These are employees who survived the 50% layoffs and opted into Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 reset, which saw about 1k employees resign.

Musk told employees this week that he wants to hire more people “who are great at writing software”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23472025/elon-musk-twitter-hiring-again-ending-layoffs

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Hearing that roughly 50 Twitter engineers were abruptly fired last night and dozens more received warnings:
-snipping link to Alex Heath thread-


Like the other recent emails, this one was unsigned. It says simply: “as a result of the recent code review exercise, it has been determined that your code is not satisfactory, and we regret to inform you that your employment with Twitter is terminated effective immediately.”


Here’s what the warning email says: “the purpose of this written performance warning is to bring to your attention our concerns regarding the quality of your coding ability, & to define for you the seriousness of the situation so that you may take immediate corrective action.” 1/


“Note that not meeting expectations could result in your termination of employment…please use this opportunity to restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team and company.” 2/

[niyad]

1. May he, and his enablers, receive everything they deserve.

[cstanleytech]

29. Aye and I refuse to be an enabler and closed my account out as soon as he let Trump back.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. He's just juicing the best he can get from them - with fear tactics - before termination

Perhaps he views these as cushy jobs where people do subpar work or don't work too hard so they don't make themselves obsolete?

[hildegaard28]

3. Seems like a

Great opportunity for recruiters from other companies to poach tech talent. Finish off Twitter by taking their remaining employees, hehehe.

[Delphinus]

25. Good point.

And welcome to DU!

[Xolodno]

33. But other tech companies are also laying off people.

Old friend of mine worked as a mortgage underwriter, he and many of his co-workers got the boot. They are having a hard time finding positions in other mortgage companies, banks, etc.


I suspect the same is happening for tech jobs.

[ThoughtCriminal]

4. I'm betting whoever did the Code Reviews

has no idea how it actually works.

The truth is that the people who write code are using subroutines and libraries that they don't fully understand.

The whole internet functions on code that would fail code reviews.

[haele]

5. How can he tell if a sample of code is satisfactory?

One segment of code that is dependent on code before or after in other sequences?
How can he test or check it? Does he wait for it to display "Elon is the Best Big Boss" after running it on a Python or Java engine?

I had a one year stint copying SW onto a 2 Tb drive and testing that drive to send out as new VM hosted software suite application system. It took a minimum of four weeks to code updates, a week to troubleshoot and tweak codes depending on the complexity of the segment they were developing. Heck, it took me two days just to test and validate their work on a VB engine before finalizing the VM and releasing the drive to the installers.

And he or his lackey can see how good a code engineer is just by looking at a hundred or so line sample of Twitter?

I suspect his spies were telling him which employees wouldn't be loyal enough to suit his management style, and making his decision that way, their expertise or quality of work be damned.

Haele

[Escurumbele]

31. The last part of your entry

"I suspect his spies were telling him which employees wouldn't be loyal enough..."

Well, everyone should unsubscribe from Twitter, I did more than a year ago, I understand it wasn't very difficult for me because I hardly used it, never been a fan of it, bit the best thing to do to make sure it disappears is for everyone to unsubscribe.

[Demovictory9]

7. Harsh

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. I thought a couple of days ago Twitter was getting creaky, tweets unavailable became available

Dunno how it did today or yesterday, haven't been reading much, thanks to DU posters posting excerpts! Dunno how rest of it is running, I have no account there.

[highplainsdem]

10. The problem with some tweets temporarily showing as "unavailable" and then reappearing

began when Musk issued his ultimatum that employees agree to "hardcore" Twitter and a lot of them quit. About a week ago. But I noticed it showing up more again the last couple of days.

Meanwhile, Musk is tweeting to boast about how much better it's supposedly working...

[moonscape]

9. This should make hiring the best engineers

a piece of cake.

[dalton99a]

11. The sadistic asshole loves to torture people.

[Yavin4]

12. What does "great at writing software" even mean?

How do you even define "great software writing"? Isn't it really software engineering which encompasses more than just writing code. Just because you're great at writing code, that doesn't mean that you can engineer a highly complex, global, popular web application like Twitter.

That's like saying because you can play the piano well then you can write a symphony.

[Aussie105]

13. It's impossible!

No person can look at a code segment in isolation and judge if it is good or bad.

Code can only be judged while part of a system that is being stress tested, bugs found, bugs traced to specific routines.
And no-one can do that quickly.
Even reading code to make sense of what it is supposed to do, can take a lot of time.

So who is doing this code testing, and what criteria are they using? Elon himself? Doubtful.

It's a smoke screen, Elon! What are you up to?

[EndlessWire]

14. He's up to destroying Twitter.

He hasn't been able to completely run off users, so he is destroying the services that run in the background.

I damned sure wouldn't buy a Tesla now. Or use his solar battery on my house. Or, take a ride on his rocket ship, or invest in anything he is associated with.

Why? Because he seems to hate people, he is deliberately cruel to others, and he makes judgements based on stuff that he is not schooled in. He has not shown any leadership ability, and I no longer trust him.

[Aussie105]

16. He makes judgements based on stuff that he is not schooled in.

The downside of "genius" is that it thinks it has no limitations.

Once it discovers otherwise, it becomes self-destructive.

Lots of examples of that in history, but "genius" doesn't learn from history.

Not only is Elon destroying Twitter, but he is also souring people to his other endeavours.

That will cost him more than what he paid for Twitter.

Tesla shares aren't doing too well, I hear.
Nasdaq: TSLA . . . Down 51% in the last year, in fact.

[localroger]

15. I'd go with "insufficient proof of loyalty"

At this point anyone other than Elon who bothers to show up for work at Twitter Monday morning is a total idiot.

[Aussie105]

18. Move along, nothing to see here.

Just "genius" self-destructing.

Sorry if you have shares in Tesla.

[moonshinegnomie]

17. im waiting for some engineers to start sabotaging the twitter code

making the site crash. or making it so musk's direct messages become public

[Aussie105]

19. No need.

Code is a living thing when it comes to complex software systems.
It needs constant guidance and grooming.

It will disintegrate from neglect all by itself.

[Dan]

27. Maybe some one outside the norm might do that but

Most serious professional SW writers wouldn’t do that. It’s just not part of our DNA.

[Treefrog]

20. Who cares? Zuckerberg fired 11,000.

Did I miss your post about that?

[Aussie105]

21. Good question.

Who got fired and why?

Did 'Sugar Mountain' explain?

('Zuckerberg' in German translates to 'sugar mountain' in English.)

[highplainsdem]

23. 11,000 total employees (not just engineers) out of a workforce more than ten times the size of

Twitter's. Did you miss the news stories about that? Or that Musk had announced he was through with layoffs and firings and wanted to hire new employees, especially engineers, days before this latest round of firings and threats?

And feel free to post OPs about Zuckerberg yourself, especially any news you might find about people fleeing his platforms as a result, news stories about turmoil, and warnings from former staff that the platforms might collapse soon and the security is already questionable.

It's regrettable that Zuckerberg had to let those employees go. But it isn't comparable to what Musk is doing at Twitter.

[Johnny2X2X]

22. Eventually he's going to be assaulted

He’ll treat the wrong guy like crap and that guy will get him alone and beat the ever living crap out of him.

[Initech]

24. He has truly gone mad with power.

And it will ultimately be his downfall.

[Delphinus]

26. And

The sooner the better, IMHO.

[relayerbob]

28. They should get exactly what the laid-off people get

They get screwed as a consequence of their loyalty.

[uncle ray]

36. the WARN Act should entitle them to 60 days pay, as this is part of a mass layoff event.

[samsingh]

30. i don't think bad code was ever a problem at twitter

this is all trump like made up shit.
musk is a bad outcome of capitalism. he purchased the right ideas but personally has no talent.

[localroger]

32. It was in the beginning

Early Twitter ran on Ruby on Rails, a scripting language and platform which wasn't known either for its efficiency or its reliability. As the platform grew it became common for users to be visited by the "fail whale," a sardonically funny cartoon inspired by the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of a whale falling from the sky. At some point they realized they needed to up their game and redid the whole platform in C or C++ with proper enterprise level tools. Many of the people who did that and made it possible for Twitter to become what it was before Elon barged in are among those he just chased off or fired.

[Emrys]

34. I've said this earlier, and I'll repeat myself.

I don't for a second think that Musk knows how to "judge" code. As of this summer, he didn't even know how to run a Python script.

I believe his fixation on "code" and "great software" is because he can't get his head around Twitter's other problems and doesn't even know what they are, let alone how to fix them. Glitchy as it has sometimes been over the years, like any mammoth cobbled-together collection of off-the-shelf often open source software bolted on to some bespoke bits is bound to be, I can't recall there being constant complaints about the quality of Twitter's software. The tech side isn't why it's not more profitable.

Musk is not a people person. Social media is, to state the insultingly obvious, about people, from the humble user to the ad executive who has to decide where to pitch their product. Worse, he's never gotten what Twitter is all about. He doesn't understand communities and group dynamics. I don't think he really understands himself, or he'd have hired some serious therapy by now.

Because Musk can't do people - at least unless they're constantly telling him what he wants to hear, not least how great he is - and because, billionaire or not, he doesn't really know how to manage a business, especially one that's ailing (as he pretended to joke the other day, "How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one." ), he's fixated on a buzzword and a non-people factor: "code". Code will fix it all.

If he hired in high-level help that might be able to address Twitter's situation, I doubt he'd listen to their input because a major part of any solution would be to change his behaviour. Like, really. I don't think he can.

Now I'm off to spend some time on Twitter. I see a lot less of and about Musk there than I do on DU ...

[Xolodno]

35. The real question becomes, can the company be run....

...stripped down of employee's, cushy benefits, etc.

If it can't, then they are going to try and bring back people or pull others from the other tech companies that recently laid off people.

If it can, then a lot of other tech companies will be watching and looking to streamline.

[PatSeg]

37. "demonstrate your contributions to the team"???

There is no "team", it is all about Musk all the time.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

38. He's in over his head

[area51]

40. +1 n/t

[Renew Deal]

39. This is more legit than most of the other terminations.