Posted on 11/17/2022 9:20:06 PM PST by SeekAndFind
I don’t think we’re about to see Twitter implode but if you’re on Twitter this evening there are a lot of people suggesting everyone who works there has quit. This latest round of departures started yesterday with an email Musk sent to the remaining work force (about half had been fired earlier this month).
Early Wednesday morning, the world’s richest man and newly installed Twitter CEO emailed the site’s employees with an ultimatum, obligating them to commit to an “extremely hardcore” work ethic or leaving the company.
Musk argued that Twitter must be ready for a more “increasingly competitive world” and therefore employees must be ready to give more. CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan provided a screenshot of Musk’s surprise email.
In it, Musk wrote, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
After mentioning that Twitter will become “much more engineering-driven,” he gave his employees a choice to get on board with his ambitions or leave the company. He added, “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” adding, “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.”
And according to this tech reporter for Fortune, most people have decided to leave.
As we’re all very aware, folks on visas are stuck, so thats who makes up most of the roughly 25% (or less than 1,000….) expected to stay. The actual impact is not yet known — there have been no internal comms about what comes next. We’re nearly 2 hours post deadline.
— Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) November 17, 2022
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
— Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) November 18, 2022
Some employees posted a countdown video to 5pm. It sounds like all of these guys were leaving or expecting to be fired.
It’s been a ride pic.twitter.com/0VDf5hn2UA
— Matt Miller (@brainiaq2000) November 17, 2022
The NY Times is reporting the company is in disarray.
Hours before a Thursday deadline that Elon Musk had given Twitter employees to decide whether to stay or leave their jobs, the social media company appeared to be in disarray…
All the while, two people said, resignations started to roll in. By the deadline, 5 p.m. Eastern time, hundreds of Twitter employees appeared to have decided to depart with three months of severance pay, the people said. Twitter later announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badge access until Monday.
Others are predicting it’s imminent demise.
From one of the remaining Twitter employees: “It (Twitter) has about a week left before it’s dead.”
— Travis Akers (@travisakers) November 18, 2022
Musk himself seems to still be in a good mood.
How do you make a small fortune in social media?
Start out with a large one.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
But Twitter itself is awash in people predicting the end is near. Here’s what the trending topics sidebar looks like right now:
So lots of people are jumping in with predictions that Twitter may implode at any moment. Some are saying goodbye.
Hoping this doesn’t happen ⬇️ but just in case: it’s been wonderful tweeting with y’all! 🐣
As a backup, follow me on Instagram, same handle: @AOC – it’s really me there, as it is here.
Or sign up for emails, where I’ll share any other platforms I join: https://t.co/Tt9J3IlWW8 https://t.co/xfe7HNvEW1
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 18, 2022
Wait, we’re all saying goodbye to each other? This is really weird.
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) November 18, 2022
Twitter can’t end. There are so many people I haven’t talked shit to.
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) November 18, 2022
I imagine this is what it will be like in the final days before the giant meteor or the Yellowstone eruption.
— Nathan Wurtzel (@NathanWurtzel) November 18, 2022
Others are just having fun with memes.
Goodbye twitter, been a good run. #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/fkkUZWz2oQ
— Bish 🗽 (@thebishundercov) November 18, 2022
Twitter HQ next fall #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/DCLnpGHPPb
— Zombae (@ZombaeVT) November 18, 2022
The Cat Memes will live on…
#RIPTwitter #CatsOfTwitter pic.twitter.com/lfWJb1sgvY— Cat Cosplay 🐈⬛ (@Cat_Cosplay) November 18, 2022
Somebody at Twitter HQ has pulled out a projector.
Someone is projecting multiple messages onto Twitter headquarters building in SF from a neighboring building.
pic.twitter.com/VuFqLvDyxT— Gia Vang (@Gia_Vang) November 18, 2022
But the reality is it’ll probably still be there in the morning.
It'll be very awkward when after hours of eulogizing this site doesn't actually go down, it'll be like saying goodbye to a date and then realizing you're walking to the same subway station
— Keef Girgo (PARODY ACCOUNT) (@CaseyMalone) November 18, 2022
Update: So true…
Nice to see Twitter going out as it lived: Hysterically overreacting to the latest news development, compulsively sharing false viral tweets that confirm its priors, and repeatedly mistaking satirical accounts for real ones. Godspeed.
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) November 18, 2022
Also:
And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
Musk owns a rocket company , right? He must have some top flight computer engineers who could help with Twitter.
What kind of man would not see his date safely home?
Almost unbelievable that in response to this AOC made sure to protect her future by telling the mincing sheep to go to another place like Instagram just in case.
Total narcissist.
redbull on tap
and bowls of nodoz
will get em back
A 20% loss on a single deal should dent the “Genius” moniker pretty heavily.
Might want to include a few large jugs of dextrose tabs. Caffeine is great stuff but the body needs sugar for actual energy.
You can skip the kale. No living creature needs kale.
I would go to work for Twitter, but I refuse to live in California and Musk doesn’t seem so keen on the remote work life.
It’s nit going to implode. More likely whimper out. In 3 months we’ll have clones, no not mastodon, competing for an erstwhile monopoly.
I kind of expect facebook or perhaps TenCent to get in on the action and grab market share.
Somehow I suspicion Musk has a method to his madness and will launch a bigger stronger company that uses far less personnel, at a greatly reduced cost, to make even larger profits.
I like the way he has got the greater majority of employees to quit by walking away, thus circumnavigating the much harder task of removing those clinging and fighting to hold on to their lucrative positions.
Many will "wake up" to the fact they had a very lucrative gig once they hit the real world looking for jobs. But, by then, it'll be too late to reverse their situation
Musk is a smart business man.
There are talented engineers but
1. Twitter needs a strategy.
2. It needs and architecture consensus
3. It needs time for transferring the knowledge
4. It needs advertisers to be willing to wait while this happens
He should have done these firings slowly and systematically while hiring replacements
Not quite. The engineers are: internal tools (including the help center, the Twitter admin, A/B testing framework, etc.), infrastructure (performance, Rails tweaking, writing job daemons), API/platform, relevance (trends, user recommendations and similarities), webclient (rewriting Twitter as a client-side application in JavaScript, other features for the web client), mobile, search, ads, release, and internationalization.
Did you know Twitter has a global network backbone with hundreds, if not thousands of peering relationships? Several hundred GB of internet traffic runs over it per day. Static video, pictures, live video and more.
There are constantly 6–10k tweets per second containing any mix of content, and it increases significantly during world and local events. And that is just contributions to the platform, not consumption of the content. It is not just a little simple website. There is a significant app layer and backend, which requires thousands of servers.
Just to support the infrastructure you have systems engineers, network engineers, hardware engineers, database administrators, data center operations, and many more. That doesn’t even start to include engineering staff to innovate and maintain the application. There are also IOS and Android app developers to maintain those applications that access the platform.
If he had fone it slowly he would have shed the lazy. Instead he’s created a stampede if good and bad employees
And a good salary
The software for a rocket company is not the same as that for a social media company. Nor the logic.
It’s like if he bought IKEA and you thought the SpaceX engineers could create good wooden furniture
Yes there are. But they need time to get up to speed and also need training and knowledge transfer
Are these people aware that they aren’t the only computer jockeys on the planet?
This is laughable. 30 percent is about right. And anyone there can be replaced.
I find it difficult to believe that Musk didn’t anticipate the reaction he’s received from Twitter employees, advertisers, and leftist users. $44B just to collapse and shot down Twitter? I’m not buying it.
Shot, shoot. My kingdom for a 60 second editor on FR.
Maybe Musk should let freepers take over the content moderation function.
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