Elon Musk has now purged roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employee base, leaving whole teams totally or near completely gutted, including those tasked with defending against election misinformation ahead of the US midterms next week, The Verge has learned.
The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams
:melon-musk: .
Given the sweeping nature of Musk’s layoffs and his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting, employees who remain at Twitter told The Verge that they expect the company to have a hard time maintaining critical infrastructure in the short term. “Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, while another called management’s layoff process “an absolute shit show.”
Also an illegal move so now he's forced to keep those employees on a payroll for 3 months without them doing anything, and he's trying to spin it as something he did out of the goodness of his heart. This is seriously one of the most insane sagas I've ever seen, I'm seriously losing my mind a little bit.
It’s illegal and Twitter is also still now being sued in a class-action lawsuit by multiple former employees: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23264409-1-main
Right? Full support, honestly. Twitter employees were getting paid well, but they were still having the majority of their labor value stolen.
his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting,
This motherfucker is probably still chapped about Levchin rallying a mutiny to get him fired as CEO over his plan to replace PayPal's Unix architecture with Windows NT.
"I have a radical idea. We're going to pull all our cloud infrastructure ....... on premises. Much cheaper!"
Elons going to try one twitter on one machine with a custom ISO of Windows Server 2008 he created using the horrific official Microsoft customisation tool.
Please tell me you can link a story on this because I need the laugh
Here you go : The PayPal Mafia - Fortune Magazine - 2007
Musk became CEO of the combined company and decided it was time for a technological overhaul. Specifically, he wanted to toss out Unix and put everything on a Microsoft (MSFT) platform. That may sound innocent enough to laypeople but not to Unix zealots like Levchin and his team. A holy war ensued. Musk lost. The board fired him and brought back Thiel while Musk was on a flight to Australia for his first vacation in years. “That’s the problem with vacations,” Musk deadpans. Musk still contends he didn’t deserve his fate, that his biggest flaw was being cut from different cloth.
At Twitter scale it might actually be cheaper to migrate back to data centers instead of paying AWS or whoever a premium for their servers. Of course, this is a stupidly expensive and painful process and requires legions of engineers and project managers to pull off, so :melon-musk: firing half the company and then trying to do it is just shooting himself in the dick.
Twitter is definitely big enough that they should be using a colocation data center. It's possible AWS gave them a crazy sweet-heart deal though, since "good enough to run twitter" is good advertising for them.
twitter will also be sued by former employees in brazil as mass lay-offs demand a prior notification here, and i am pretty sure the only court that actually works in brazil is the labor court so that will be fun
like these companies have national subsidiaries which generally are pretty easy to reach and call to a court, also brazilian judges can ban a site for not following the brazilians laws they have to follow so they work in here (whatsapp has already been banned and un-banned multiples times on the country for some really weird reasons), and we are a pretty big market, we are all online freaks so i don't know musk would probably lose more money fighting this then just paying them what they are owned,
musk would probably lose more money fighting this then just paying them what they are owned
Sounds as if he will fight this, then. Guy seems to love shooting himself in the foot recently.
In communist dictatorships leaders rule by fiat and workers have no recourse when they suffer the harsh reality of their overlord’s whims
If they're worried about running out of money for legal fees if this thing drags on too long, I could probably be talked into sending them...I dunno, eight dollars a month?
techbros organizing is just slightly less likely than the literal spectre of communism manifesting and de-nazifying europe
Well the tools and the material reality are obvious. :bugs-stalin:
