November 11, 2022

"What is the guidance for tweeps with children and other dependents who need to arrange childcare etc? These are not arrangements that can realistically be changed at a moment’s notice..."

"... for example enrolling in daycare, hiring nannies, arranging managed care facilities, etc. This new policy seems designed to penalize parents, guardians, and other caregivers who may have designed their whole lives around full or partial remote work."

Asked one Twitter employee, responding to the demand that Twitter employees — "tweeps" — work in the office, after they had been told, last year, that "they could work remotely forever," quoted in "Inside the Twitter meltdown Elon is speaking. VPs are resigning. Is bankruptcy next?" (Platformer).

How many children does Elon Musk have that he needs to make arrangements for? 

People magazine had an article about this just last month: "Everything to Know About Elon Musk's Family (He's a Dad of 10)/Elon Musk is the father of 10 children, including a pair of twins and a set of triplets with his ex-wife Justine Wilson and a boy and girl with ex-girlfriend Grimes." 

"Custody of our five children is split evenly," Musk said in a 2010 Business Insider op-ed. "Almost all of my non-work waking hours are spent with my boys, and they are the love of my life." 

How many non-work waking hours does he have? It could so easily be zero. 

The oldest children, the twins, were born in 2004, and one of them, Vivian Jenna Wilson, is transgender and "no longer live[s[ with or wish[es] to be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form." 

Musk's response to that was to blame the schools: "It's full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil. It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can't win them all."

Even as he makes his own workplace harsher on employees with children, he loftily and loudly bemoans the widespread disinclination to bear children: "I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate. Please look at the numbers – if people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words."

Do you want civilization to crumble? 

74 comments:

Jaq said...

Twitter had a lot of problems, one of them was that its workers thought they owned the company. Not sure Musk can fix them.

Breezy said...

“designed to penalize” is a stretch, I think. These are typically at-will jobs, and business situations can change the relationship. Certainly needing to keep the company from failing is a harsh reality for Elon, as is needing to find childcare for employees. It’s not a penalty. It’s the reality of the situation requiring a change. If WFH is more important than the job itself, find a job that fits that need. Reaching for victimhood is childish here.

Mark said...

Elon has never been about being consistent or avoiding hypocrisy.

His lack of expertise in managing people has become quite clear. The fact fhat he had to grovel and on Monday rehire crucial people he fired last Friday should tell you everything you need to know about his lack of a plan.

He just lost 50% of the institutional knowledge and most management who know why decisions were made and only after they walked out the door realized what he did.

It's been two weeks and it's already a raging dumpster fire.

Mary Beth said...

I didn't have child care when I worked from home, but I was self-employed and earned my income based on the amount of work completed. That let me take breaks as needed and gave me a lot of flexibility so I could do kid-related stuff.

If I had been working for someone else and was paid for my time, I would have had to have child care, even if I was also at home. (Do their job descriptions say that it's typically an x hour a day/xx hours per week job?) It seems to me that many of these employees should have had child care arrangements already.

Eleanor said...

A person working from home and who is taking care of children at the same time is not fully engaged in work. The company is essentially paying for the time spent on childcare. Find the average cost of childcare in the area and offer the employee the option of coming into the office or having that amount deducted from his or her salary. I support parents having a work from home option if the job can be done from home, but to suggest a person who has little children underfoot can be as productive as the same person fully engaged in work is feminist BS.

Leland said...

As if nobody has ever had to make arrangements like this. If these problems are so difficult to solve, then Twitter may be too complex a place to work.

gilbar said...

well, it seems that for a Large percentage of 'tweeps', they won't have to worry about going in to work; on account of because, they've been laid off. If you're not one of those.. Maybe you can just quit?

But, seriously; i KNOW how they feel. I worked at this one place.. Where they suddenly came up with All These Rules; about Not drinking at work, and Not doing drugs at work, and Not f*cking other workers at work...
It was a REAL hassle!! Suddenly, ALL of our work habits had to change.

Tom said...

Twitter has outrageous costs and is on the verge of bankruptcy. No one at Twitter is entitled to their job. For Twitter to work, it’s going to take a small dedicated group of people who move heaven and earth. And it’s going to take entitles brats to go away. The initial layoff addressed the most obvious brats but there’s still change needed. If the workers didn’t see this stuff coming when Elon began this process, they may not be strategic enough to work at a company that needs a massive amount of strategy at the moment.

If I were Elon, I’d move the company to Texas or Ohio and turn over most of the workforce to folks who want to build a great platform and don’t see political manipulation as part of the job duties.

Enigma said...

Cry me a river. The 'tweeps' receive $150K to $300K salaries, and pretty much every tech firm offers lavash on-site benefits relative to non-tech industries.

Glassdoor on Twitter salaries: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Salaries-E100569.htm

Many employees may have been hired for the San Francisco HQ location -- where $150K pays for living in a van down by the river. So, perhaps the needs here are (1) more housing in SF, or (2) relocate the jobs to Texas, etc. where living a good tech lifestyle is cheaper.

From 2020: "Twitter is a unicorn-meat taco within a dream"

https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/18/twitter-office-san-francisco

Mark said...

Tom seems to think one can just hand software engineers a decade of bloated code and they can not only keep it all running but to design innovative ideas on top of it ... and in no time flat as the company is losing money.

Go ahead, move to Ohio or Texas during that time too. That won't increase costs or add disruption.

Big Mike said...

I didn't have child care when I worked from home, but I was self-employed and earned my income based on the amount of work completed. That let me take breaks as needed and gave me a lot of flexibility so I could do kid-related stuff.

And Biden’s Labor Department has issued a draft rule last October 4th that would have the effect of ending gig work such as you describe. The 45 day comment period will soon expire.

Big Mike said...

Eleanor is right. Mark has no clue.

tim maguire said...

If you're working from home, have a small child, and don't have childcare, then you're not really working from home, you're cheating your employer. If your child is older, they're in school. Arranging aftercare, including short-term stopgap care, is not difficult.

tim maguire said...

Mark said...He just lost 50% of the institutional knowledge

That's not a problem if it's the 50% he doesn't need.

Howard said...

Musk is just showing his very human side by being a hypocrite. Also, he claims to be a first principles thinker. When your kid has problems, it's not society, the schools or their peers that's responsible. It's the parents.

No matter, Twitter is his problem now. It'll be interesting to see how it all works out for good or ill or meh.

iowantwo said...

It's been two weeks and it's already a raging dumpster fire.

It easy to judge when you get to determine the metrics. Since we have no idea what Musk's goal is, its impossible to know if he is making progress.

You could use your metrics and call msdnc and cnn raging dumpster fires, IF you are using viewers, hence advertising. Bezos at WAPO, another example.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

These people could have lost their Twitter WFH jobs at any moment and had to go back to a typical office job. If they didn't have plans for how to take care of their children in that scenario, they're irresponsible. How long has Musk's purchase of Twitter been in the news? Ending WFH is not unexpected.

Big Mike said...

Some large, forward-thinking corporations arrange daycare in their facility. Some of them even have quiet, closed off areas where young mothers can continue to breast feed their babies. Back on the day it was usually provided as a free perk, and a available for fathers as well (who did not attempt to breast feed infants). Do if the wife worked somewhere that did not provide it, the father could still bring a child to free daycare.

Curious George said...

"after they had been told, last year, that "they could work remotely forever,"

Nothing in this world is forever.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

Blogger Mark said...

Tom seems to think one can just hand software engineers a decade of bloated code and they can not only keep it all running but to design innovative ideas on top of it ... and in no time flat as the company is losing money.

Go ahead, move to Ohio or Texas during that time too. That won't increase costs or add disruption.


The company is not losing money due to a lack of immediate design innovation. They're losing money because their costs exceed their revenues and have for some time. The current staff and working conditions hasn't led to profit, perhaps because the workers spend too much time on political manipulation and padding their own nests. And since this clearly is not a new development, your fear of making changes is irrational. Not to mention that letting ethically compromised employees blackmail you with the machinery of your own company is dumb.

Ann Althouse said...

"Cry me a river. The 'tweeps' receive $150K..."

Would you like to try to live in San Francisco with children and a $150,000 salary? And need to pay for day care? You would not be well off.

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

Did you teach law students from home while parenting, Althouse?

Jersey Fled said...

My wife had a very good job when our first child was born, but we had agreed from the beginning that she would leave it and be a stay at home mom. That was important to us. We made a lot of sacrifices to raise our girls the way we believed was best for them.

The key word being sacrifice.

These Twits want everything their way and if they don’t get it it’s your fault.

Ann Althouse said...

"These are typically at-will jobs, and business situations can change the relationship."

There's no discussion in the post of the legal relationship between the quoted employee and the employer, and there's not enough information in the post to talk about that. The issue isn't whether Twitter can legally treat its workers like that and demand that they return to the office after they were encouraged to believe they'd be allowed to work at home permanently, which would have caused them to buy houses, sign leases, have children, enroll children in schools, not budget for a car or for in-city parking, etc. etc. So many live expectations.

An employer has an interest in morale and in its reputation with new recruits and with customers. Twitter is kind of going to hell right now. It is losing $4 million a day, I just read. Its business depends on non-employees voluntarily providing content for no compensation and it's asking these content providers to start paying for the privilege.

So the fact that it may have a legal right to fire a lot of these people isn't the main point at all.

MayBee said...

I cannot believe all the drama Twitter people engage in

I get it. They have problems. So do a lot of us all across the country. Why are we supposed to care so much about their drama?

Leland said...

Not sure what the point is then as Meta is laying off just as many. Same with Ford. Are those layoffs Musk’s fault? Are they because workers can’t find healthcare? Making a bad economy story about one CEO seems odd, yet that is the main point we have to discuss? Tell us again about cruel neutrality.

My wife just left to a job fair hoping to find new nurses willing to leave their family for 12 hours a day to work a job that must be done in person. And people think healthcare should be a right and free.

Aught Severn said...

My sympathy meter is pegged low on this one. Having been one of the few who has neither worked from home nor had any significant time off during the pandemic and had to deal with daycare for 3 young kids (including a cross-country move and scramble when we were notified on a friday of a daycare closing down the following Monday) in the midst of school closures and remote learning, I get that it is expensive and hard. But that is life and daycare should always be something you have a contingency plan for. They need to harden up, stop whining, and get on with their life.

Big Mike said...

If the code is as bloated and unmaintainable as Mark suggests, then Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal must have pretty crappy managers. Good that they’re gone then.

Ann Althouse said...

"So many live expectations" should be: "So many life expectations."

Andrew said...

I was looking forward to Musk's purchase of Twitter. But it really does seem like he's making it up as he goes along, without much foresight or planning. Some of the people he fired are the ones who know how to keep the technology running. His presenting ideas as if they were a done deal, and then cancelling them, suggest instability at the top. If advertisers withdraw, where's the money going to come from? Twitter certainly needs an overhaul, and Musk as a visionary might have something to offer. But his style of communication is sending very bad signals. Like he's an immature child, not an adult running a business.

MartyH said...

Hire a former co-worker who just got fired to take care of your kids. Win-win!

Can'tFindADecentAlias said...

I guess I missed a memo.
"it's asking these content providers to start paying for the privilege."
I saw he was making blue-check tweeters pay to maintain a verified identity, but paying for the right to tweet?

Gusty Winds said...

I had a young guy from an automotive company in Detroit tell me he "works from home on Mondays and Fridays".

My response was, "Cool. You work three days a week".

Perhaps we should stand up and fight for the $1 per day tech workers in China that assemble all our phones...and work in all the shitty factories. Or the exploited children that mine the cobalt for our virtue signaling Tesla batteries. Or the slave labor that makes our clothes.

And here in America. The ditch diggers. The construction crews. The people who mow the yards, and collect the garbage. Or the one's that wait on you at your table. And the Hispanic cooks in the kitchen that we can't see.

Shouldn't they be able to work from home too dammit?

Or is this only a privilege of the upper crusty over credentialed? The liberal SF Tech workers making $150K plus. Oh and of course...University Employees.

Yeah. Cry me a river.

Jamie said...

Tom seems to think one can just hand software engineers a decade of bloated code and they can not only keep it all running but to design innovative ideas on top of it

Do I see herein an admission that the code is bloated?

We shall see whether Musk's approach works or not. This is the man who founded and in several cases continues to run Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and the Starlink system. Managing people is appropriately the job of middle managers; CEOs manage strategy and, to the best extent they're able, boards of directors.

I've known four CEOs of $billion-plus organizations through my husband, maybe five if you count the time the COB acted as CEO for a while; none of them ever got into the weeds of "managing people," beyond their direct reports. And in the case of the direct reports, they got replaced with fair frequency, because the CEO needs to know that those direct reports are smart, effective, focused, and loyal, and when they're not, they need to be out.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Ah the “COVID changed everything” crowd wants accommodations. If it was that important they would have started making arrangements six months ago when it was clear Musk was serious and Twitter had decided to force the sale. I’m lacking sympathy for this kind of snowflake propaganda journalism. No one gives a damn in the media about all the destroyed small businesses because of heavy handed lockdown theatre. The delayed or foregone surgeries. The widespread damage barely touched the laptop class and the contrast to how media is slobbering over shithole Twitter is disgusting.

Millions in pain and financial hardship and they keep crying about people who still have a job?

Leland said...

And much time is saved by not commuting.

How many lives are saved at ER by first responders not commuting or nurses and doctors providing remote health?

How many homes are erected by builders not commuting?

There is remote learning, so you don't have to send your children to school and save the teachers from commuting.

Maybe you can call a plumber, who via Zoom will explain how to change your garbage disposal.

This has to be the main point, because it is not Musk failing as a CEO because he makes employees go to work. Otherwise, you'll have to explain the billions lost at Tesla and SpaceX, which would first require billions lost. FTX lost several billion just this week. Meta is falling apart. Ford laid off 3,000 workers in August. Amazon lost a trillion this year. In fact the top 4 companies in the US lost a combined $4 trillion this year. Is it because of return to work? How about we point to the person who claimed that he would make those companies pay their share? (But he won at the ballot box! Did he? Republicans got 12% more votes than Democrats, that's a 24-point swing from 2020).

Jamie said...

And much time is saved by not commuting.

This is true, but the concerns of this particular tweep center on the fact that s/x/he apparently has not been employing any kind of care for small children (or, I suppose, elderly relatives) this whole time. As a longtime SAHM whose husband worked from home over the COVID period, I'm here to confirm that even a dog - which is what I had to deal with during the WFH period, our kids being in high school by then - would have required a dogwalker if both of us had been working.

Small children? You can't plunk them in front of a screen and expect them not to bug you repeatedly, even if you're the type of parent who is ok with your children sitting in front of said screen all day. So I agree that if you have little kids and no childcare and were pretending to give your work as much focus at home as you were in the office pre-COVID days, then you weren't working very devotedly in the office either. If you survived the first round of layoffs, maybe you're one of the 20% who does 80% of the work, and if so, good for you. But the difference is that you can't just lock your kids in the house like a cat when you hop on BART in the morning.

So yes, now you have a problem to deal with, but you should have been dealing with it all along - or expecting and making plans to deal with it as soon as you heard Musk was potentially talking over (or that Twitter's old management was going to unload 10% of the workforce).

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Mark seems to believe all those Tweeps were hardcore coders. Mark thinks the guy that built PayPal, Tesla, Space-X etc just “doesn’t know how to manage people.” I’m highly impressed by Mark’s wild assumptions and willingness to expose his ignorance on a public forum. Go Mark go!

Temujin said...

It's hard for young adults who have been treated as spoiled kids their entire working lives, to have to realize that their cush job for life is no longer a cush job for life and that they'll have to come back to the pack. Where the rest of the labor market resides.

This will happen, in varying degrees, to all of Big Tech. Of course, everything is relative. For instance, a drop in some daily benefits at Google is still like a luxury 5 star resort for 99.9% of the world's employees. I mean, if they lose one of their food stations and one of their Chef's at lunch, at least they'll still have the sushi chef and locally grown vegetables.

Twitter employees having to show up at the office? Oh the humanity! IF Twitter was too much of a mess to actually make it work, and if it has to go under, Elon Musk will still survive, still keep his brain moving forward, and still be producing.

Unlike, let's say, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Moondawggie said...

"after they had been told, last year, that "they could work remotely forever"

In the immortal words of Eric Stratton: You screwed up: You trusted us!

Perhaps the WFH gang can sue the former Board members and stockholders for not keeping that promise as part of the terms of the sale agreement?

AlbertAnonymous said...

Welcome to the real world “Tweeps”.

Now get over yourselves you entitled little shits.

Rob C said...

I think it would depend on when they joined twitter. If it was pre-Wu Flu then they really have no place to complain except maybe expect a little extra time for making arrangements. If it was during the Great Shutdown/Shut-In then maybe they were under the impression that the working conditions they had should continue in perpetuity.

Now, as many of us know / have experienced, we don't have a "right" to a job. Things can change quite quickly and you're out looking for work. Based on that, I think new management certainly has a right to set new expectations in their attempt to deal with what they perceive as a status quo that cannot continue.

Aggie said...

When long experience teaches you to live with both feet planted in the Real World, I gotta admit it's a little satisfying when the Real World starts to re-assert itself a little bit. Telling people they're going to have to report for work so their performance can be assessed is not a dumpster fire, it's the fire department doing its job.

Not a Musk fan, but I think Elon is making the right moves, and another state would be an even better one.

Aggie said...

When I was working in the Caribbean the company instituted a policy of elective work-from-home days. This was over 5 years ago. An employee had a certain number of these days, and once they cleared it with their boss, they could take their laptop home and work. Some used it for caring for a sick kid, or some special occasion, some just as a break from the workplace, so on. I use to call them 'work-from-the-beach' days, because it always seemed to be hard to get in touch by phone, although the email replies were usually fast.

Big O's Meanings Dictionary said...

decompositional analysis - definition/opinion

NOUN

The act of developing an analysis and structure for an existing, operating computer system starting with only the source code, data structures and a vague description.


This was my occupation for the last ten of my thirty-five years of fiduciary systems design and implementation, typically but not exclusively dealing with the FedWire system.

This is done while the system stays live as one cannot simply stop business for the duration of the rewrite. This is mandated by FedWire but Twitter is in the same position of needing 24/7.


Blogger Mark said...

Tom seems to think one can just hand software engineers a decade of bloated code and they can not only keep it all running but to design innovative ideas on top of it ... and in no time flat as the company is losing money.


Tom is correct. The only error is your addendum of "no time flat". It will take time and people with experience doing the analysis.

Twitter was losing money from before the acquisition so that's a red herring. It's also the reason businesses require the analysis/reconstruction in many cases.

Vonnegan said...

Things like "nannies" and "daycare" are for kids who actually need care, and that's a full time job that you don't do while you also do your Twitter "job". If you were doing both you were not fulfilling your job obligations, period. I can understand people being a bit put out because they have to find their older kids a way home from school now, when with WFH they just walked or drove over to school to get them - or if they have to find younger elementary aged kids after school care now. But that's isn't what these folks are saying. At the tech company where I work, anyone "working" while trying to take care of, say, a 2 year old would have already been fired.

Big Mike said...

At one point i my career I worked for three different companies in succession without changing my office. My response to Althouse, who spent nearly her entire career in academia, at the same institution, is that for us in the corporate world change is a constant. New bosses, new corporate logos, new rules. At every change we were brought into conference rooms and assured that changes would be gradual and done respectfully without impacting our day to day work activities. They were lying.

If Musk wishes to consolidate his operations in one site as a (needed!) cost-saving measure, what does that do to people who have a long term lease in San Francisco? Not Musk’s problem!.

My old corporation moved its huge headquarters from LA to a place with lower costs and lower traffic congestion. They offered a relo package — since my own office did not move I don’t know how generous it was — and there was no recourse. From young receptionist to mid-level manager to a direct report to the CEO, you moved, or you took retirement (if you qualified for a pension) or you quit.

Welcome to my world.

MadTownGuy said...

MartyH said...

"Hire a former co-worker who just got fired to take care of your kids. Win-win."

The down side of that is the self-employment tax owed by the child care provider. If the parents claim the child care credit on their taxes, the provider is required to declare the income and pay self-employment tax.

Wince said...

I don't care if it hurts
I wanna have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice
When I'm not around

So fuckin' special
I wish I was special

But I'm a Tweep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doin' here?
I don't belong here...

I don't belong here

Breezy said...

So the fact that it may have a legal right to fire a lot of these people isn't the main point at all.

Also not the point I was making.

Big Mike said...

There are infinite ways in which employers are "cheated" out of the 100% full attention of employees. People can be unproductive in the office too. How many in-office folks are playing video games or looking at whatever they want on the internet.

Yes there are, and some unproductive time is tolerated by a good manager when the employee is otherwise pretty productive. If the IT monitoring software catches people playing games (or reading and commenting on Althouse or some other blog) then they are counseled by their manager, and if they continue with time wasters then they are invited to their manager’s office at 3:00 or 4:00 on a Friday afternoon and told that this nice person from HR will go over their rights and legal obligations as a former employee, and this big, burly man from security will escort them back to their desk to collect their personal items, their corporate laptop, and, at the door, their badge. Access to corporate files has been blocked and any passwords to corporate resources have been changed. People caught accessing porn are treated the same, except they don’t get counseling and a second chance.

And a manager who cannot bring himself (or herself) to cut unproductive staff will get an invitation to meet with his (or her) own manager at 3:00 or 4:00 on a Friday afternoon.

You can judge people by the work they do, not by how much of their time they fixate fully on their job.

@Althouse, you can, in theory, but you’d probably be surprised how often one runs across managers who can’t. But I’ll tell you who does. It’s the other members of the team. They know who’s pulling their fair share of the workload. Morale will often go up when the staff sees that empty desk or cubicle on Monday morning.

Darcy said...

Musk is right about a lot of things lately. Nobody is owed a job that enables them to stay at home to work. It is a luxury too many took for granted during COVID. A soft generation churned out of disastrous public schooling is learning a hard lesson.

PM said...

In addition to re-staffing its Market St. headquarters in SF, I believe he's shuttering its cafeteria. Good news for area sandwich shops whose main job has been getting people to stop squatting in their doorways.

Joe Smith said...

"Would you like to try to live in San Francisco with children and a $150,000 salary? And need to pay for day care? You would not be well off."

It's doable...but you'd be struggling unless you bought your house a long time ago.

***

Tweep = Twitter + Creep...

Wa St Blogger said...

Would you like to try to live in San Francisco with children and a $150,000 salary? And need to pay for day care? You would not be well off.

Tee error in this is that it assumes the parent is a single parent. That might be true for some. However, I expect that most are 2-income families, making their family income more like 250k given The bay area's economics. The other assumption is that the other parent cannot work from home. Why can't THEY?

Joe Smith said...

'In addition to re-staffing its Market St. headquarters in SF, I believe he's shuttering its cafeteria. Good news for area sandwich shops whose main job has been getting people to stop squatting in their doorways.'

It's in a pretty crappy part of town.

It will help to get the building filled up, but Market is a mess...

Joe Smith said...

'It easy to judge when you get to determine the metrics. Since we have no idea what Musk's goal is, its impossible to know if he is making progress.'

Best comment.

Hillary thought winning the popular vote would get her a prize.

Look how that worked out...

Ron Winkleheimer said...

One day in the life of a twitter employee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc

Free red wine on tap and meditation rooms, I don't understand why you wouldn't want to go into the office. No wonder twitter is losing 4 mil a day.

Jupiter said...

"Would you like to try to live in San Francisco with children and a $150,000 salary?"

That's actually a question I have been asked fairly often. I've always said "No".

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

Blogger Ann Althouse said...

"Cry me a river. The 'tweeps' receive $150K..."

Would you like to try to live in San Francisco with children and a $150,000 salary? And need to pay for day care? You would not be well off.

Learn to code. Somewhere else.

MikeR said...

These people think they can work with their kids at home? They can't. Till now no one noticed.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

That's actually a question I have been asked fairly often. I've always said "No".

I've seen offers for $50,000 yearly salaries for tech jobs in NYC, granted that was a few years ago, but who would take that job?!

Known Unknown said...

Althouse has gotten the memo that Musk is to be denigrated.

Leland said...

"Would you like to try to live in San Francisco with children and a $150,000 salary? And need to pay for day care? You would not be well off."

The issue of wellbeing living in San Francisco is less about salary and cost of daycare versus just living in San Francisco. Nancy and Paul make much more money and have grown kids.

Tom said...

When a company is bleeding cash and on the verge of bankruptcy, morale is a luxury. Twitter is smattered with entitlement. That is an organizational cancer. Twitter’s only chance at survival is a radical change and that is going to include mass changes in personal. Musk can find a few thousand talent people who want to work their asses off to make something great (and profitable). But he’s going to need to get out of SF and way from a culture of entitlement. He also needs get to a location where cost of living is lower so that salaries can be more in line with revenues. He knows all of this and he’s doing it.

Twitter employees have to know they’ve been paid world class salaries and perks for way less than world class results for way too long. And that should be a reminder to anyone who’s being overpaid for the value they’re bringing… eventually the endless spigot of cash turns off.

Patrick Henry said...

I will concede that Musk should have known that he was coming in to hostile territory. The twits didn't like him before he said he'd buy Twitter. I'm willing to bet that they're not willingly making the transition easy and wouldn't have even if he wasn't going to fire anyone. It's on Musk to have not anticipated the reaction from his new employees (this is making the assumption he didn't anticipate it. It's quite possible he did and is just dealing with it in his way).

As for the sudden ending of working from home: prior to Covid-19 companies, especially those in the "Valley" would compete with in-office perks to get employees to join them. Being in-office was one of the reasons to go work at one of these companies. Now, many of the same people, don't want to go in the office. I don't blame them for not wanting to go in the office (I intentionally looked for a remote work job), but there's no right to work from home. If I were in Musk's position, I would have said "as of Jan 1, you are expected to work from the office" and give them the rest of the year to adjust or find a new job.

PM said...

Joe on Market St, SF: "It's in a pretty crappy part of town. It will help to get the building filled up, but Market is a mess..."

True. But when the .coms boomed, and SF built up South of Market, it also refurbished Market St and gave tech companies great deals to build there. Except the .coms also built in-office restaurants, diversions - all free - so no one had to leave the bldg to explore, eat or shop. They just went home to the Mission at night. Market St went into a slo-mo balloon deflation. Hello homeless.

Mikey NTH said...

Twitter employees expecting company provided benefits to exist forever.

"Point at them! Point and laugh!"

Gospace said...

67 years old, first child at age 25, last at 44. We never had problems arranging childcare. I worked, she was a full time housewife and mother. Amazingly despite this traditional stifling relationship, stifling according to liberal philosophy, we both happy and well adjusted and our 5 children raised in this according to liberals unhappy and unhealthy environment are all successful adults.

If a married couple cannot live on one income, they need to reevaluate their lifestyle. If they have kids and aren’t married and need childcare, well, sucks to be them. Somewhere along the line they chose poorly.

rcocean said...

Hilarious that Globalist Liberals and the DNC Media now care about Big Corps and how they treat their workers. LOL!

Maybe we should bring back legislation for strong unions. What do you think Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates?

rcocean said...

Poor Elon. He don't nothin' about running a business. Listen to the experts on the internet, Elon. They're super-smart!

rcocean said...

Tweeps or TWerps? YOu make the call!

EAB said...

Solely blaming Musk is a mistake. No responsible company tells its employees a particular policy is forever. Business conditions change all the time. Firms are acquired all the time and policies, benefits change. You cannot reasonably have an expectation a new owner will keep all the same policies, especially in a company that is losing money. Just as you can expect a lot of jobs to be at risk. Been there, done that. It’s horribly uncomfortable, but it happens all the time.

I agree $150K in SF is a challenge if you have kids. How likely is it, though, that’s the total family compensation? The odds are it’s two-earner family if they need to find childcare.

Marcus Bressler said...

Hey, Ann, Elon says he doesn't want to sleep with you.

Marcus B. THEOLDMAN