"Second prize is a set of steak knives."
Posted on 12/12/2022 8:58:42 AM PST by Red Badger
Inspired by the recent actions of new Twitter owner and chief executive Elon Musk, more business leaders in California’s Silicon Valley are dismissing surplus employees.
The startup and venture capital industries appeared to take note as Musk acquired the social media company and dismissed two-thirds of employees with no apparent impact on the platform’s operations. According to the billionaire entrepreneur, the number of new Twitter users and the amount of time users spend on the site have increased under his leadership.
“The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly really matters,” Atreides Management Chief Investment Officer Gavin Baker remarked, adding that many Silicon Valley executives begrudgingly admire Musk. He cited an email from a venture-funded manager dismissing employees and explaining that only top performers would be permitted to keep their posts, recalling language used by Musk as he downsized Twitter in recent weeks.
“We will start to hear ‘lighter is faster’ and references to small teams being superior to large teams,” Baker continued. He noted that “strong CEOs cut early” when the odds of the company’s success are higher, and employees have better prospects on the job market, while “weak CEOs cut late and thereby put everyone at risk.”
“Nature is healing,” Musk replied, appearing to reference Silicon Valley’s former culture of scrappy founders stretching every dollar and focusing narrowly on business outcomes.
Beyond the dismissals, Musk told remaining employees that they should expect “extremely hardcore” working hours if they desire to stay at the company. He added that the firm would become “much more engineering-driven,” implying a pivot away from “design and product management” emphases.
In the wake of the dismissals at Twitter, executives have faced pressure from investors to reduce bloated payrolls. Companies such as Meta, HP, Lyft, DoorDash, and Amazon have announced layoffs or paused new hires, citing macroeconomic pressures and excess growth in their staff following the demand surge that accompanied the rollback of lockdown measures.
Commentators have drawn attention to a reckoning in the technology sector’s job market as social media videos of employees enjoying company amenities while appearing to do little work have gained traction. One 23-year-old product manager at Meta, for instance, recorded a “day in the life” video complete with workouts and free coffees rather than staff meetings or work calendars.
“It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people,” Altimeter Capital Management CEO Brad Gerstner wrote in a recent letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “I would take it a step further and argue that these incredible companies would run even better and more efficiently without the layers and lethargy that comes with this extreme rate of employee expansion.”
Baker likewise contrasted “summer” and “winter” executives, noting that more are transitioning to the latter category after the actions taken by Musk, constituting a boon for venture funds. “They are going to drive margins and do more with less,” he said. “Their companies will be more likely to succeed and their employees will do better.”
Layoffs at Twitter: BAD!
All the layoffs are because the PPA money finally ran out. Biden pushed that out as far as he could so the economy “looked” better than it was for the midterms. Now, he has is corporate cronies are ejecting “excess employees” and dead weight as fast as possible.
That’s a very good observation.
This will snowball into a huge recession, starting in California..................
Imagine all the real estate in S.F. going on the market at once. Reality is about to hurt.
Uh, the way it works here in the Silicon Slum is really simple: high valued companies full of coders hire hordes of women to do “admin” work since they would never meet or date them in any environment outside of those walls.
And it’s especially true of the H1B dominated companies. No casper males around, but lotsa blue eyed females attending to the “needs” of brown eyed males from the Indian subcontinent.
A short drive down Amphitheater parkway in Mountain View at lunchtime will demonstrate this rather clearly.
Can we put Elon in charge of the US office of personnel?? If they removed half of the workforce, productivity would go up a lot for sure and hopefully a good number of the dem coconspirators would be gone too. He could start by eliminating the dept of education and move toward the original 4 cabinet posts.
Maybe some of these companies will learn that having and spending Millions in “diversity and Inclusion” VPs, directors, coordinators, staffers does NOT actually help the bottom line?
This is a direct result of the normalization of interest rates.
The free money era bankrolled all of this leftist nonsense.
You don’t really think the 7500 laid off “employees’ who spent their days in the yoga studio and petting their emotional support animals were ACTUALLY running Twitter, do you?
It becomes more evident day by day that this was a DHS-FBI-CIA combine, with international connections, to control and then direct the US political conversation, first to get rid of Trump, but more importantly to prevent the emergence of a broad nationalist movement. The 7500 laid off employees were window dressing.
They didn’t just do it here. They clearly stacked the deck in Brazil, and there is much, much more to be learned before they somehow immobilize Musk. who has kept his power level very well hidden.
They’ve been living large in silicon valley for a couple of decades now, long before PPA. The technerds had them convinced that they were all indispensable and deserved special perks. Musk is proving that’s far from the truth.
Webdev kids fresh out of college have had entry level pay near six digits or even into six digits depending on their area of expertise. Even without a degree, someone who can code can make $80k. They have coding boot camps that are a few months long.
I am betting that the ‘real’ profits of the companies that have no real product, are significantly lower that they purport to be.
We may see the simultaneous scrambling of investors to divest themselves before the fall.................
“A short drive down Amphitheater parkway in Mountain View at lunchtime will demonstrate this rather clearly.”
Now for a total non-sequitur: We lived in Mountain View (our oldest son was born there) in the early ‘70s. Wife even worked at Intel while we were there. I was stationed at NAS Moffett Field. Haven’t been back there since about 1975. I guess it’s all changed. We loved the place.
Imagine going from the six figure salary and perks galore at these Silicon Sandcastles to the EBT level of the unemployment lines with the Great Unwashed.................
Hell, let's just make him Preezy & Rock 'n Roll!!
Just following Kamalala’s lead..............
Even before Covid, some of the people running high-tech firms feel that they can run both a profitable company as well as serve a left-wing agenda. I remember a local news story about an executive wanting to send a message about minimum wage (before Covid). He raised wages of his lower-income employees to a minimum of $70,000/year. But a few years later (still before Covid), his company started to have financial problems.
"Second prize is a set of steak knives."
Imagine how many government employees could be fired without anyone noticing.
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