Esther Crawford's Twitter profile says: "early stage products @twitter. previously ceo @squad (acq'd by @twitter in 2020 which was acq’d by @elonmusk in 2022). raising 3 humans w/ @bobcowherd."
Background: "Elon Musk to Lay Off About 3,700 Twitter Employees on Friday: Report" (Gizmodo):
Musk also plans to institute a new requirement that all employees come into the office, reversing Twitter’s flexible work-from-anywhere approach instituted during the start of the covid-19 pandemic. Musk has previously said that people who work from home are only pretending to work and Twitter employees have started sleeping at the office to meet the billionaire’s tight deadlines, according to photos posted to social media.
Crawford's profile says she lives in Berkeley, California. Can you get to a Twitter office from there? Sure. Can you raise 3 humans w/ @bobcowherd from there? Of course! Depending on @bobcowherd.
Here's a Twitter page recruiting workers and listing all the places where you can work in an office, including San Francisco and San Jose. Lots of other place too — Boulder, Boston, Portugal....
I just took this screenshot on that page, where Twitter states a policy that seems ludicrously deceptive at this point:
Right under that are 3 sentimental, colorful images within tweets by what look like Twitter employees. The first shows a cute toddler and: "I'd be commuting right now #lovewhereyouWFH." The second shows an orange cat sitting on a laptop keyboard and: "Are you kiddin me #lovewhereyouWFH." The third shows chocolate chip cookies and: "Just got a delivery of warm cookies from my family to power my work day. Sometimes I really, really do #lovewhereyouWFH."
All 3 of those tweets are from women, and right under that, it says "We're all about flexibility and equity."
But now don't those women seem to have marked themselves as the ones who will be fired, now that half of the employees must go? Indeed, doesn't the idea of cutting half suggest cutting all the women. Now, I don't think that's what Musk would do, but it does seem as though the people who will get cut are the ones who are acting too much like the traditional female role and responding to a sweet, cushy offer to stay home with their kitties and kiddies and cookies.
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Ford is about to push 3,000 people off. Lyft has announced layoffs. People lost their jobs and businesses during the pandemic. People lost their jobs when the Keystone pipeline was canceled.
It's horrible to lose a job, but Twitter employees are going through a psychodrama right now, and I don't know why the average person would get drawn into it.
Musk is an engineer. He knows Twitter has too many employees.
And that picture was staged.
Obsessive work is nothing new in the tech industry -- it thrives on obsession. Way back in the 1970s and 80s starting with the bully monopolist Bill Gates of Microsoft and bully "reality distortion field" freak Steve Jobs of Apple, tech employees spent long hours glued to their monitors. The old Fry's Electronics chain was half grocery store and half computer store. Tech firms have looooooooong given away free beverages, often given out free luxury lunches, had break/entertainment rooms with billiards, table tennis, foosball, etc., given out free beer on Friday happy hours, and offered other on-site benefits to eliminate departures for daily chores.
Everything was designed to facilitate additional hours in the office and reduce the overhead of travel time out of the office. All of this makes perfect sense for a small startup living on investor / loan money and that's looking to become a billion dollar business. This culture tends to persist after they become billion dollar businesses.
Bully bosses in tech are nothing new. Mentally unstable tech workers on the autism spectrum are nothing new. This is a proven formula for success in emerging technology. Women may indeed be less likely than men to choose this lifestyle or exhibit such characteristics...per 100+ years of research and data.
Remote work opportunities for males (who can take it or leave it) versus females (who often greatly desire it) stands to be a huge pain point for the next generation.
If women earn only $0.77 on the dollar then Elon needs to fire all the dudes.
I have little doubt that it is mostly women who should be fired from Twitter.
I met close to zero competent women coders in 50 years in the biz. Women congregate in HR and management. Remember Musk saying that Twitter has 10 managers for every coder?
The quota system meets its objectives mostly by placing the quota babies in HR and managerial jobs. These jobs are quite often just make-work, or worse, have no purpose but to enforce Woke edicts and to stage Diversity workshops.
I often take a look at the CV of tech writers, a field now dominated by women. Rarely do any of them have any hands-on tech experience. Liberal arts majors who just know the buzzwords.
So, yeah, women with featherbedding jobs at Twitter do need to be fired en masses. Also at your local hospital, university and government office.
"And that picture was staged."
If it's not staged, I question the judgment of the person sleeping with such a warm sleeping bag indoors. What's the room temperature? It would need to be under 60° for that covering to make sense.
Evaluating talent by how willing they are to sleep on the floor of their office and spend insane hours working is an interesting metric.
I bet the next time I talk to my sibling, their tech company will have hired talent away from Twitter. Unlike Elon, most parents like to see their kids daily.
I know Ann expects us to focus on women being fired or something but this whole Twitter episode is only one example of the post covid fright reckoning going on amongst the young work force. A new reality is emerging for young workers who have been courted and indulged their whole lives to a peak of bratty obnoxiousness. So far they are still defiant, sternly lecturing their bosses and listing their demands and offering ultimatums to owners trying to coax work out of their highly paid employees. We're some of those bosses...
Yes, you're going to have to come in to work. Yes, you're going to have to work on Fridays. No, this isn't an unreasonable request.
We're learning a couple of empty nesters working part time is better than one full time new staffer. We're trying to build good employees in the aggregate as Billy Beane might say. We're also putting in the time to time to hire visa workers, too. They're always productive..
Althouse seems oblivious to the reality that her feminist, gay worship ideology is the fount for the call for censorship and Woke enforcement. This is not an unfortunate reading of her philosophy. It’s the only outcome possible.
The intellectual rationalizations for feminism and gay worship seem compelling, but in practice both lead inexorably to political repression, censorship and Woke propaganda.
In 60 years of practice, the outcome of Althouse’s feminism and gay worship is political repression and censorship. Maybe it’s time for the prof to recognize that these are features, not bugs.
Remember when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo and told people they needed to come into work or be fired. And everyone was like "This is terrible for women! Women who work from home get stuff done! You can't fire them!"
And then Mayer pulled out the stats and showed people - including women- had not even been logging on and in fact had not been getting stuff done.
It was another work drama we were asked to get involved in, even though maybe our own neighbors had lost their job that week and nobody card.
I work in employment and recruiting. I remember the dot com boom and bust in the late 90’s and 2000. Same story. Startups grow, gain traction , hire a ton of people and then realize they’ve hired too many people. What happens next is the collapse of a career bubble..
You have a large group of people who were in the right place at the right time and who get hired in support type non tech jobs- marketing, hr, project management, etc. These people have no real skills outside of their title and status and are often overpaid. They are overpriced, just like a house right before a housing price collapse..
Easy to layoff and find significant savings. For many, this will have been the peak of their career. I would feel bad for them if they were not the biggest group of pompous asses I have ever seen.
I've been a programmer/systems engineer for 30+ years, and I can say Enigma isn't wrong. I've worked for an insurance company, not a tech company, but have at times had to work nearly around the clock to resolve system issues. Even just day to day work can sometimes inspire a kind of monofocus where you 'wake up' to realize it's well past quitting time if you're not interrupted. I once left my wife outside at a company picnic on the office grounds for several hours because I had to respond to a trouble call and naively thought "this'll just take a few minutes", and each time the process abnormally terminated I figured it would be the last run.
"I know Ann expects us to focus on women being fired or something...."
False. Depending on what you mean by "something."
You don't know what I expect, but I would like you to write accurately and not attribute thoughts to me that you can't "know."
In fact, writing this, I saw many discussion topics, and I expanded on things that I noticed, but I would like the comments to expand on anything that's in the post, especially if you see angles that I *haven't* flagged.
The work/life balance is a longstanding topic on this blog. It's important aside from the gender dimension. And the Twitter takeover is an ongoing topic. Musk's approach to management is important. Firing so many people on one day is interesting. The phrase "raising 3 humans w/ @bobcowherd" is fascinating...
Lots of stuff. Choose your own adventure.
If you have a skill set, and know how to work, how to communicate, in writing and orally, you are easy to employ.
Those that lack the simple stuff above, have to find religion, so they can pray for a company to hire them, because they are super woke.
In the software world projects that demand such a high level of personal commitment are called “death marches,” and the phenomenon is well-described in the books Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1986) and Showstopper by Pascal Zachery (1994). A software project usually becomes a death march because it is large, complex, begun without adequately understanding what the software is supposed to do and how it is supposed to do it, poorly scoped, poorly estimated, poorly staffed, and inadequately budgeted. Or some combination thereof. That level of commitment, sleeping at the office, isn’t that unusual out in Silicon Valley,, so whether the people who sleep at the office stay or go depends on the value of thd project they are working on to the firm’s bottom line.
During the course of a 45 year career in software development I was on three of them. They’re rough, but I never had to sleep in the office. A 40 minute commute home during rush hour is less than half that at 10:00 at night.
If I were "bobcowherd," I would be concerned about this post.
This looks like a perfect way to cover for an affair. "I'm having to sleep at the office because of Musk, honey!"
I wonder who she is sleeping with at the office.
The phrase "raising 3 humans w/ @bobcowherd" is fascinating...
I tripped over those words and had to go back. She would be on my list to axe. It is a huge window into who she really is. I'm a dad and granddad, and proud of it. I worked to give our kids the right foundation to have a happy life, and the grandkids are evidence we did something right. Something of value was created.
I've raised animals, hogs, cattle, dogs and cats. I rear, parent, mold, children.
Back at the law firm, we pulled all-nighters once in a while. I remember one night, a guy decided to catch a couple of hours of sleep under his desk, and then another woman, thinking he'd gone home, went into his office to leave something on his desk. She tripped over his head and screamed, thinking he was dead.
Some jobs just aren't predictable, particularly for a service entity like a law firm. On the other hand, this didn't happen often enough that we had bedding at the office.
The type of sleeping bag didn't stand out to me. Remember, Ann, your preference for a really cold environment is unusual, especially among women. If it's not staged, though, what I wonder is where she stores it. If she's sleeping in a conference room, that means she doesn't have her own office, so where does she keep the bag when it's not in use? The trunk of her car?
"Lots of stuff. Choose your own adventure."
I am fixated on Esther Crawford's bra strap.
It is like she is in the act of undressing for TwitterLand.
Oops, she says casually: my shirt keeps falling off.
That's what I noticed.
I am Laslo.
I met close to zero competent women coders in 50 years in the biz.
I question your ability to evaluate talent. I was the tech lead on one large project they called “Big Mke’s Harem”* because I had recruited so many team leads (and they in turn recruited a mix of male and female, but mostly female team members). The project was quite successful. I liked to recruit people who were ready and eager to show what they could do, but for whatever reason they hadn’t been given that chance. Often enough these were female or black.
________
* Except it wasn’t really called “Big Mike’s Harem” because my name isn’t Mike.
Having spent 20 years in the Navy, reading some of these complaints is humorous.
I agree that the picture is staged and/or the "sleeper" is bathed in sweat.
Any company will have dead wood. There are people everywhere who draw a paycheck and do very little work. I'm not sure why Managers put up with it.
OLD, "We're all about flexibility and equity."
NEW, "We're all about giving our customers what they want and being profitable."
At first it was called downsizing, then corporate America hired better PR agents, who changed the name rightsizing. Not sure if it still has a name (it's a close cousin to creative destruction, but not quite the same thing), but companies with more employees than they need to achieve their targets eliminate the excess. That's painful for the people who lose their jobs, but it's good for the company and ultimately the country.
Certainly it's possible to commute from Berkeley to San Francisco. I did it for 6 years, decades ago. One can drive over the Bay Bridge, one can take AC Transit buses, or one can take BART (under the Bay subway). I did all three.
People who own their own businesses will often find they get no sleep, particularly at the early stages of the business. Even if you leave work, you're up all night thinking about what needs to be done, what's coming up that next day, so you get up and go into the office or operation and you just start working again after only a couple of hours home. Better to keep getting things done than to toss and turn in bed waiting for morning.
Once long ago in a state far away I owned a restaurant which opened for lunch at 11am. But we were in there at 8am to start the prep. Served all day, and had an attached bar that was open until 4am. And when we left work, it's not like we were able to just go home and conk out. There was an unwinding period needed. Those were some rough years. But, it was me doing what needed to be done. Amazing what you can do when you're young and love what you're doing.
People who think they are rare or have it bad, or need to show that they're sleeping in the office are not the ones I'd want on my team. The productive just do the work. They don't stage it. Don't feature it on a video or social media post. They don't talk about it (until years later in some comment section of someone else's blog). They just do it. Elon Musk will know who the productive are and he'll filter out the rest.
As it should be. Big tech employees have had so much come to them at such early stages of their lives. Overpaid, overpraised, overfed, and underworked for the most part. They'll find out what it's like to work for an entrepreneur who doesn't sleep. Those who survive will be among the best of the best and they will be rewarded handsomely, I'm sure.
So, let's see..
a) Twitter has SO MANY employees, that Even the old admin wanted to let 10% go
b) Twitter has SO MANY employees, that the New admin wants to let 75% go
c) There's Just SO MUCH WORK TO DO, that twitter employees REGULARLY sleep on the floor
One of these things.. Is Not Like The Other.. One of these things, Doesn't belong
Half the workforce fired; women and children suffer most? Is this a parody post?
There are lots of jobs that don't require putting in overtime. Go find one or stop complaining.
Or build your own twitter.
On the women angle, assuming it isn't a parody, men and women have different priorities. It's not enough for women to have the option of whether to jump on the treadmill or not. There is a contingent that wants the treadmill not to be an option for anyone, or else it can be an option, but people who choose it shouldn't get benefits from making that sacrifice. It's selfish.
He pays his money and takes his chances. It's going to be what it will be not what you hope or predict it to be.
A non exercising coder dweebess probably doesn't generate a ton of body heat, hence the North Face Sub-Zero silver burrito.
Elon is single-handedly delivering a virtual slap back to reality to us all. Our fortunes are built with focus and teamwork, not cookies and cats.
I doubt he’s laying off people simply for WFH. It’d be more about their productive impact to the company. He wants Twitter to be successful, after all.
What if Esther Crawford believed that her feet were her best feature?
Would her Twitter photo be of her feet, with one shoe half-on?
I bet she has a pair of stilettos, for 'special occasions'.
I am Laslo.
My first job after uni was at ROLM, a top tier tech firm with a few thousand employees. One day about 11 Am we were all hustled into the cafeteria. A 25% layoff was announced. We were told to go back to our offices, not discuss it, wait for our manager to tell us if we still worked there. The only reason we had even that much warning was because the news had leaked to a San Jose newspaper and would be in the afternoon edition (yes, I am old).
At Apple, a large layoff was presented to staff "here's the new org chart. If you are not on it you dont work here snymore."
So, cry me a river, "Tweeps"
the people who will get cut are the ones who are acting too much like the traditional female role and responding to a sweet, cushy offer to stay home with their kitties and kiddies and cookies
Elon would not be very successful if he made employment decisions based on such stereotypes. I think he will care about two things:
1. How productive were you while you were #lovingwhereyouWFH?
2. Now that you have to come in to the office, are you going to pout about it all the time, or can you embrace the new normal?
It's development. I've done that.
Deadlines are deadlines, and things break when you test them. It's also not forever, and there is a definite goal. This appears to be crafted to appeal to people who have no sense of any of this.
Sounds like fun. A simple system: Every section head needs to identify half of his or her employees for termination, by Friday. If he didn't do that, the entire section including him is terminated. We'll handle the fallout.
Use any system you like in your section for determining who goes, but log it and understand that we are going to review it as part of deciding on you.
Musk is going to fire shitloads of Twitter employees who obviously produced nothing but censorship and company bloat. Twitter users won't notice any difference except the liberal freak out that is actually quite entertaining at the moment. That type of employment bloat is all over.
There are people employed in many industries that have other people dig holes just to fill them in again. They produce NOTHING. They actually detract from an organization's mission. They're the ones that send out emails using the word "robust".
The sectors where the US needs workers are understaffed, and the sectors where it can be cut in half (like colleges, banks) are driving people into massive debt and producing nothing for the economy.
The blue checks on Twitter are pissed that anyone can get verified for $8 per month and the playing field is being leveled. It's not the $8 that pisses them off. Now the surfs can get into Studio 54 too. It was supposed to be a status symbol. They'll just have to keep their pronouns and Ukrainian Flag in their bio.
I don't plan on paying $8 for verification. I don't care. I'm just watching the shit show. You can still continue as is for free.
Recall the anecdotal story of legendary Steve Jobs firing somebody who rode in the elevator with him. A person he never met before.
Or Vince Lombardi walking to his first practice as Packers coach and fired the player walking with him saying: "You're too fat to make our team".
Mark said...
I bet the next time I talk to my sibling, their tech company will have hired talent away from Twitter. Unlike Elon, most parents like to see their kids daily.
Their adult kids?
Daily?
Dubious.
A woman in the 21st century named "Esther" who isn't an 80 year old bubbe is surprising. In my experience, anyways. It'd be like meeting a 22-year-old arts major named "Gladys" or "Mildred".
Anyways, times are going to get tough. I remember well the tech blood-bath of 2000-2002, when 10s of thousands of skilled coders got laid off after the Nasdaq bubble burst. A lot of people never worked in that sector again, and a lot who did never saw those kinds of salaries again; big companies moved a lot of the coding to India and China.
If you're good, you'll bounce back. If you're fair-to-mediocre, and simply rode the crest of a wave for a few good years, I hope you didn't pile on the debt when times were sunny.
Winter is coming.
Musk is an engineer. He knows Twitter has too many employees.
True. But the reason he knows is because he has collated all the facts (numbers) and defined goals. After he has done that, he tosses in his personal preferences, and does a risk benefit analysis.
Quick observation. We eat at Texas Roadhouse. Very good meat, and great service. Before covid I timed the table turn over. From the time a table stood up to leave, until new customers were seated at that table, cleaned and prepped was <3 minutes. Engineers figured out it was not the number meals served, but the number of times tables turned. Most places save money by not hiring specific staff to bus tables. TRH ignored the common wisdom, and did what it took to turn tables.
That's what engineers do. Fine tune processes.
False. Depending on what you mean by "something."
You can wrap up your agenda in whatever wrapper you choose- It's your sandbox. I'll stick by my statement...
Jefferson's Revenge said...
I work in employment and recruiting. I remember the dot com boom and bust in the late 90’s and 2000. Same story. Startups grow, gain traction , hire a ton of people and then realize they’ve hired too many people. What happens next is the collapse of a career bubble..
You have a large group of people who were in the right place at the right time and who get hired in support type non tech jobs- marketing, hr, project management, etc. These people have no real skills outside of their title and status and are often overpaid. They are overpriced, just like a house right before a housing price collapse..
Easy to layoff and find significant savings. For many, this will have been the peak of their career. I would feel bad for them if they were not the biggest group of pompous asses I have ever seen.
This is part of the takeover of the US workplace by Human Resources.
These are a lot of people who don't produce anything or do anything but they sure do like to tell other people what to do. And they love their status. Status is what motivates them rather than accomplishment.
In order for these parasites and Karen's to get a job requires the government to crush efficient competition.
So they hire the same type of person to serve in the government bureaucracy. The same kind of mediocre control freak that works in HR also serves at the EPA.
It is a repeating loop where governments and corporations grow together squeezing out small efficient businesses and replacing them with huge corporate/bureaucratic behemoths full of HR/bureaucrats.
Disrupters disrupt.
Musk paid a fortune for Twitter, giving employee-shareholders the best financial bail-out they will ever see in their lives. Now, he is going to try to make his investment pay off. Headcount needs to go down, productivity needs to go up, and the employee mix needs to change. He needs more productivity, less fun and games for the staff, less management, more product. My friend the business consultant observes that if you have high job openings ("Now hiring") coupled with low productivity, you probably aren't doing something right. His conclusion: people need to go back to the office full time. One way for Elon to sort out his workforce is to step the tempo and require that people show up for work.
It is also interesting to watch him rework Twitter's revenue model and add a subscription fee base. That will probably shake out a lot of bots. Elon's challenge is to make something that users are willing to pay for which was formerly available without payment.
Elon is one of America's great promoters, and watching him in action provides real entertainment value. There will be plenty of bumps in the road, and watching incumbent staff get the sadz as they self-identify their tribes is just an early act in the drama.
Stupid theatre bullshit. As I understand it the problem is too many employees “working” from home who are unproductive not too many working so hard they just fall asleep under their desk.
I've been in the software biz most of my life, and when I get together with others in the biz, we look at each other and say, "whathefrack takes 5,000+ people to run Twitter?" Seriously, how many coders do you need to program how to post and repost a couple lines of simple text? It's like hiring 5,000 mathematicians to help people add two digits together.
So we figure that Musk has a long way to go before he gets down to the one junior Python/C++ programmer and his backup high school intern actually needed to keep Twitter going.
"Sounds like fun. A simple system: Every section head needs to identify half of his or her employees for termination, by Friday. If he didn't do that, the entire section including him is terminated. We'll handle the fallout.
"Use any system you like in your section for determining who goes, but log it and understand that we are going to review it as part of deciding on you."
Have you ever wondered why the non-military Federal government doesn't do a version of this? There is no reason they couldn't do a series of 10% per year RIFs over three to five years. The national economy would undoubtedly improve.
There is the old Ronald Reagan joke about the federal government's relationship to business: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
One of the other things that Twitter will need to go through is a switch in skill sets.
There will be an emphasis on moving Twitter from web 2.0 to web 3.0.
With web 2.0 it was databases and storing user information for exploitation.
With web 3.0 it is going to be decentralization and micro transactions.
They will need coders with blockchain experience. Gonna be some turnover there.
Laslo Spatula said...
I am fixated on Esther Crawford's bra strap.
It is like she is in the act of undressing for TwitterLand.
Oops, she says casually: my shirt keeps falling off.
What DO they do in those "sleeping" bags? Why are they so sweaty?
"The work/life balance is a longstanding topic on this blog. It's important aside from the gender dimension."
But it's the gender dimension that usually gets highlighted, and rightly so. Just recently: big article in the WSJ on young women wanting balance etc. etc. The usual. Women's lib on the employer's dime.
And there's nothing wrong with women on average not wanting what men want. Really, men and and women differ, in the distribution of traits and preferences. It's fine. It's good even. But what's not good is demanding to be equally rewarded for unequal performance, or to want all the goodies that come with all-out performance without showing the all-out commitment, or to whine about men being truly successful as male-supremacist risk-taking entrepreneurs and women on the whole not being as successful.
Back on topic: Sleeping in the office has no value in itself. Showing off could be a negative issue. But indicia of desire to do a great job under pressure are valuable.
"That's what engineers do. Fine tune processes."
Some of em. But I've met a few who were in love with their title and not so good at picturing the end product.
Eng."That's not they way it's supposed to work. You did something wrong."
Me," This is the data you gave us. Here Look."
Eng. " I see that. Why didn't you build it that way?"
Me. " We did."
At this point the engineer usually stomps off and complains to the boss that the shop guys,(me) are being wise asses.
I’m old enough to remember all these twitter twerp types telling us, during Covid, that employers can (and should) demand your health info, take your temperature, require masks be worn and nasal testing be done to prove you’re negative for C19, and even require that you be vaccinated and prove it to your employer OR YOU LOSE YOUR JOB. And they wanted people to lose their jobs if they didn’t carry that same political view.
Now… wahhhhhhhhhhhh You big mean employer, you don’t have the right to require me to go to work for you at your place of business, or to actually work while I’m there. You’re mean and oppressive. Stop bullying me. I want to work from home and I’m entitled to that!
They sound like that old audio tape of Mel Gibson drunk, yelling at his girlfriend, demanding that she blow him in the hot tub “because I deserve it!”
Good riddance…
Shoot, I used to pull all-nighters when I was running a small, struggling preschool. During the days, I had to deal with children, parents, teachers, supplies, maintenance, meetings... So at night I built and added content to our website and dealt with our other social media, and strove mightily to find ways to market this tiny out-of-the-way place and keep it afloat.
I am no marketer, and if the church had been in a position to fire me from that part of the job, they would have been wise to do so - one of my ideas was to give every child who toured the preschool a little stuffed lamb that I designed and made myself (another thing I did at night), which of course meant that every current child had to have one too. My dining room was a sweatshop of one.
What I'm saying is, I was not especially good at my job. (Oh, the teachers and parents all loved me because I would do anything to make those children feel happy and those parents feel that they were getting more than their money's worth, but I was flailing a lot of the time - not at all qualified to be a school administrator.) But that school was NOT going to go under on my watch. If dogged determination is something Musk is looking for, I would not be on the chopping block.
But he'd be a fool to keep me on that basis, and he's not a fool.
I have worked at tech companies when we had 'all hands' on the production floor.
That means sales people, secretaries, marketing folks, etc. went out to the warehouse to put together the technology kits that the company made.
It's what you do in startups that are non-union.
You do whatever it takes to make the company successful so that you can get a paycheck and your stock value rises.
If you don't like it, leave...
Are they human? Really?
'A woman in the 21st century named "Esther" who isn't an 80 year old bubbe is surprising. In my experience, anyways. It'd be like meeting a 22-year-old arts major named "Gladys" or "Mildred".'
I worked in a Chinese-owned company, being one of the only white guys there.
All of the women had 'Americanized names' but they were mostly German instead.
'Gretchen' was a favorite...
I'm going to go out on a shaky tree limb and say that Elon Musk probably knows more about what to do with Twitter's employment practices than Lefty Mark with the sibling who works in tech does. Just a hunch.
These bastards championed stay-at-home orders that led to millions of layoffs for those in traditionally blue-collar sectors (especially hospitality, manufacturing and transportation). Twitter employees have never faced the prospect of being laid off with no work for the foreseeable future. They're not going to like it.
We're at the start of White Collar recession led by Big Tech. The vast majority of Twitter employees are living paycheck to paycheck in too big houses they can't afford. There are no more $ 250,000 per year jobs and the housing market has turned to sh*t. Life is going to get rough. And once these brittle bastards turn poor, they're more likely to commit suicide, abuse drugs or turn to alcohol or even sex work to make ends meet (just like the hillbillies and "White trash" they brutally mock).
“A woman in the 21st century named "Esther" who isn't an 80 year old bubbe is surprising.”
You would think, but the name has apparently made a comeback. I currently know three Esthers, one under 50, the second under 30, the third under 20, and only one of them is Jewish (none are bubbes).
We humans love being mean other humans.
Either it’s, “Get your Covid shot and shut up. Or you’ll be fired and never get to travel or see your grandkids.”
Or it’s “You slacker, lose your job and shut up. So you’re fired and have your life turned upside down. We’re sick of your whining.”
Actually, we’re not sick of the whining or the tears. It’s all music to our ears.
I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for Twitter employees who have spent the last two years supporting people losing their jobs for not taking the poison mRNA COVID shot.
1999-2000, I worked on contracts in Silicon Valley. I was the only time I was expected to work routine 100-hour weeks. Which was easy to do, because I was on travel away from my family and they did pay (straight-time) for every hour worked. We did sleep at the office, but not with a sleeping bag, mask, and pillow. It was also during this time that places like Google (which was still pretty small at the time) started pushing to make the workplace a place to live. I always took that as building a trap to convince employees it was better to be at work than with their family.
If you recognize the dates, you know what happens next. I was fortunate, because I was only consulting and just came back to Texas to consult elsewhere and work normal hours. Still, thousands lost their jobs, and a decade later, I would be part of a mass layoff of 7,000 engineers at NASA. As many noted above, other companies in other industries are also having mass layoffs. When inflation is rampant, there is too much supply, and you don't need employees making more of something that nobody wants to buy. You need scarcity. Speaking of... lots of welding jobs in California need talent. Learn to weld!
He ought to line up the employees and say, "if you're an fbi plant or foreign spy aiming to undermine the enterprise or if you watch tiktok videos all day, please take two steps forward."
How can Twitter have 7000 employees? They produce no content- what do they do? New York Times - for all its bias - puts out a content filled website 24-7 with many fewer employees.
People lose their jobs through immigration reform, through labor arbitrage, through environmental arbitrage, through Green deals, through progressive prices, through diversity doctrine (DIE).
Musk understands that larger tech companies are run like universities. Too many administrators and too many whiny professors.
Cut the administration to the bone and get rid of the whiners.
Blogger What's emanating from your penumbra said...
"On the women angle, assuming it isn't a parody, men and women have different priorities. It's not enough for women to have the option of whether to jump on the treadmill or not. There is a contingent that wants the treadmill not to be an option for anyone, or else it can be an option, but people who choose it shouldn't get benefits from making that sacrifice. It's selfish."
Yep.
Assuming the heat is off at night you too would sleep in a sleeping bag in San Francisco. Bloody cold at night that place. Lived there. Know.
Small step from a sleeping bag to full-blown metamorphasis.
news flash. most of America could give a damn about twitter, or 'socialist resisters' who are making big money, and now find themselves out of a job.
tough times are here, again. Unless you are in government, or the education 'industry', in which case recessions and unemployment are something you read about, not experience.
Musk owns it now, and most of the people bitching have no idea what that even means. He will fire people based on the needs of the company-If twitter is like most large companies, there is a lot of wasted time and energy.
Life can be tough, things change. Find another job, or stay home and worry about your pronouns and gender id.
Most of us don't care.
Hahaha. They act like they are special.
Ross Perot, EDS, Death March(es) survivor here. We met deadlines agreed to by managers and team sales proposal who didn't know the details involved. The company wanted that business so 80+ hour work weeks and migrating systems or large enhancements to production over holiday weekends so you had an extra day or two sans the end users being at work were just part of getting the job done.
The women I worked for/with at EDS back in the early 80s knew their stuff - but often tended to end up pursuing the management track because at some point, some women did want to be able to spend time with the children they brought into the world.
@Amadeus 48 wrote: "Have you ever wondered why the non-military Federal government doesn't do a version of this? There is no reason they couldn't do a series of 10% per year RIFs over three to five years. The national economy would undoubtedly improve."
Federal agencies are jobs programs. Federal agencies are jobs programs. Federal agencies are jobs programs. The military is no different today.
- Elected officials get some policy idea and need people to execute --> hire a bunch of specialized staff or let 3-5 year contracts
- Elected officials feel there are too many X and not enough Y or Z in the agency --> hire a bunch of Ys and Zs even if not needed
- Elected officials want more votes for the next election --> create positions to hire those loyal to the current administration
- Elected officials want to maintain shadow control over agencies when their party is out of power --> create hard-to-kill positions
- Elected officials engage in quid pro quos, job swaps, and de facto bribery with large organizations and sectors, be they the Military-Industrial Complex, Labor Union-Industrial Complex, the Healthcare-Industrial Complex, the Education-Industrial Complex, the Housing-Industrial Complex, the Agribusiness-Industrial Complex, or the Investment-Industrial Complex
We got ourselves a global government, it just turned out to be a massive mafia-like, UN-like bureaucracy.
From the start, I have been highly skeptical of the "work at home" phenomenon. IMO, it takes an unusually disciplined individual to be as productive at home as at the office. And I say that as someone who often had the freedom to work at home and did, from time to time, working on lectures, grants, papers, etc.
Althouse: "You don't know what I expect, but I would like you to write accurately and not attribute thoughts to me that you can't "know."
Correct.
Plus, the mindreading role at Althouse blog is already quite full with both Inga and Dumb Lefty Mark.
That's how Mark "knows" how much Elon likes to see his own children.
Achilles: "One of the other things that Twitter will need to go through is a switch in skill sets.
There will be an emphasis on moving Twitter from web 2.0 to web 3.0.
With web 2.0 it was databases and storing user information for exploitation.
With web 3.0 it is going to be decentralization and micro transactions.
They will need coders with blockchain experience. Gonna be some turnover there."
We'll never really know what is going on in Musk's mind and what the vision of twitter will be under Musk until Dumb Lefty Mark provides us his almost unique "insight" and clairvoyant services as to what that vision and plan is and its likelihood of business "success".
Sort of what Inga used to do for years, and still does intermittently, when she provided Althouse readers daily updates on what Mueller and Weissman and the hoax collusion "investigation" (LOL) team were "really thinking" and "what was really going on" and why "Trump and his entire team should be so worried" and "what evidence Mueller already had".
It was all quite "informative".
The Soul of a New Machine is an amazing book about pre-PC tech. See also, Halt and Catch Fire (all 4 seasons) for 80s/early 90s tech (“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”)
Yes. These Twitter employees are doing important things to further the cause of humanity. You know: giving a platform to lefties and censoring righties, promoting COVID and Chicken Little BS, stuff like that. Important stuff!
John Holland said...
A woman in the 21st century named "Esther" who isn't an 80 year old
Unless you are Jewish, LDS, Amish, or a number of other religions
Ah, one of the classic employment fallacies: working very hard means you are really good at your job.
The fact of the matter is an employee is only as valuable as the value they produce for the company. Valuable employees tend to have a standard skill set: dedication, hard-working, talent, intelligence (at least relative to the position), etc. One of the fallacies is you pick out one of those traits - this employee is very hard working - and then conclude that makes the employee valuable. A related fallacy is to pick out a trait that the employee lacks - this employee is lazy - and then conclude the employee is not valuable. That's not how it works. There are lazy, grumpy, borderline mentally ill employees who generate great value to a company, and there are super determined, hard-working, cheerful, incompetent employees who should immediately be wished well in future endeavors. There are literally employees who steal from the company that are still more valuable than some well-meaning chap who has no idea what he is doing.
On a higher level, a company could have nothing but excellent employees who would all be very valuable on their own, but the company has no way to benefit from all of them at the same time. Sure, Employee A would be a great value to the company, but so are Employees B through ZZ, and we can only really use, say, 10 of them. Very valuable employees that cannot be utilized are as valuable as incompetent, useless employees. The company either needs to increase their capacity to take advantage of these employees, or they need to get rid of some of them as they are a drain on the company. (There's also the matter that if this is the situation, the superfluous positions tend to get filled with bad employees over time, since they don't actually do anything anyway and the manager wants to retain the headcount.)
As a corollary of this, a bankrupt company has no valuable employees as far as the company is concerned, because the company itself is not valuable.
Highly enthusiastic employees who love their jobs are a net negative if they are enthusiastic for the wrong reasons. The employee who comes in with a smile every day to spit on the customer's food is not something you really want to advertise.
This work-ethic was typical back in the nineties and early 2000s when I worked in IT support at large financial firms. And by the way not everyone in IT support is a coder. There were system administrative jobs that involved only a little coding, but you did need to know in detail how the operating system worked and how to read code in the computer languages used.
It's a job for young people, make and female, who want to make a lot of money and have the energy to be available 24/7 to the company to get the job done by the deadline. I pulled many all-nighters back in the day.
There were few females, and most of the women, but not all, did not have children. We were in our twenties and thirties. Certainly not a lifestyle for a young woman starting a family, unless she doesn't mind leaving her baby with a nanny. At the salaries we got paid she could certainly afford a nanny.
We got very high salaries and in addition we got big bonuses at the end of the year; at the Wall Street firm we got bonuses that were equal to some people's annual salaries. If you didn't want to do it, as others said there were plenty of 9 to 5 jobs available. I quit when I hit my forties and didn't want to work those long hours anymore.
It came with the job that if you did not produce you would be "laid-off". Layoffs happened almost every year.
I know (few) young people today who are OK with this type of lifestyle for a few years. I'm sure Elon Musk will be able to figure out who those people are.
The occasional all-nighter or even being at work for days is occasionally required. But we've all met those who are in the office insane amounts of time as a matter of course.
In my experience, some of the worst managers come in early and stay late every day. They have no idea how to prioritize, and have never learned that there is not enough time to do everything everybody wants done. So they become workaholics, answer every email, ask millions of questions about everything, and generate as much work for others as they do themselves.
I've also seen some of the best leaders be first in and last out.
There is no correlation between hours in the office and talent.
So I guess this is the end of "quiet quitting," hmm?
a company could have nothing but excellent employees who would all be very valuable on their own, but the company has no way to benefit from all of them at the same time.
My husband (a finance guy) made this point at an executive team meeting just last week. The head of HR was touting the necessity of having a staff of "superstars," and my husband pointed out that if everyone is a "superstar," how do you keep them there when the plug-and-chug work needs to be done? What you need, he said, is a few superstars and a bunch of decent, competent, but not super-ambitious people who just want to do their work well but leave their jobs behind at the end of the day.
The CEO said, "Oh my gosh, I've never thought about it that way!" The HR head was a deer in the headlights.
@Fred Drinkwater, I have better stories than that. One company where I used to work decided to cancel its largest project and did so by calling an “all hands” meeting in the company auditorium. After some BS about how much the company appreciated their hard work, but then they said that the project was terminated and they were all laid off. While they were in the auditorium IT had changed their passwords on desktops or confiscated their laptops. They were allowed a half hour to collect personal items from their cubicles and told to leave the office. Security checked them at the door, collecting badges and checking their boxes for anything that looked like it might be company stuff and confiscated it.
(I got this from friends I had left behind when I quit that outfit a couple months earlier.)
I've done overnights at work. Working overnight implies being conscious.
Sleeping in a sleeping bag at the office is not working. It is sleeping, and all she is doing is virtue signalling to all the people walking past her in the office, and telling her manager about it, and seeing her picture online, how wonderfully diligent she is by sleeping without going home to her own bed. Virtue signalling, on stilts, using rollerskates.
Something tells me Mosk no long sees the elimination of bots as a priority.
"grind and push in order to deliver"?
Don't anybody tell Rebecca Solnit.
If staying at home with the kids is important, then here's the opportunity to do so.
If you are truly 'sleeping in the office' (lol) then you aren't doing the former. There's a lot of mixed messages, here, and really seems like a lot of whining.
Oh, and the first person to mention Agile development, or is a 'scrum leader' is fired.
DanTheMan said...
...
There is no correlation between hours in the office and talent.
11/4/22, 10:38 AM
Bears repeating. These people who are 'sleeping at the office' (lol...again) are really not very productive.
If women earn only $0.77 on the dollar then Elon needs to fire all the dudes.
========
only as long as they identify as 'dudes!'
will trans-ing allowed during trans-ition?
" ... previously ceo @squad (acq'd by @twitter in 2020 ..."
What that means, is that she was guaranteed a high-level job at Twitter as a condition of the purchase. Start-ups are purchased to acquire their assets, or their staff, or both. Seldom their CEOs. Generally speaking, companies in a position to purchase other companies already have all the CEOs they need. So, if she got the agreement in writing, she will probably get a nice payout.
Staged! As an avid camper, I can tell you his bag and pads are very high end. I'm not doubting he can afford that with the salaries in the multiple hundreds of thousands, but clearly the guy has no time to camp, so what's he doing with all that pristine, expensive camping gear? And I agree with Althouse, it's got to be far too warm indoors for that bag. It's probably rated at -15 to -20. And it doesn't look like it's ever seen the outdoors.
Price's Law states that the square root of the number of employees do half of the work. For 7000 Twitter employees that means about 84 employees are doing half of the work. I wonder if guys posting pictures are in that vaunted 84.
If Elon can target the right employees to fire he won't even miss half. The guys doing the coding know who the stars are, I wonder if management does.
Censoring Karen or Kyle as a job description probably is not as in demand as the kids getting their walking papers
Musk removed “days of rest” from Twitter staff calendars.
Copy pasta to your browser 👉🏽 https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1588239851526451200?s=20&t=KquM-r4qkjaSOoOUhIwnLg
"c) There's Just SO MUCH WORK TO DO, that twitter employees REGULARLY sleep on the floor"
To me, the citations in Ann's post read more like people who are rushing to the "on-site, in-mind" mode of work but there was little talk of productivity. Sure you sleep at the office, but are you productive. Are you on-call. Or are you just hoping to be seen? If the latter, I wouldn't expect it to impress Musk much.
The bureaucratic "look busy", have meetings crowd at Twitter are about to meet the reality of someone who focuses on productivity.
Blogger Big Mike said...
@Fred Drinkwater, I have better stories than that. One company where I used to work decided to cancel its largest project and did so by calling an “all hands” meeting in the company auditorium. After some BS about how much the company appreciated their hard work, but then they said that the project was terminated and they were all laid off. While they were in the auditorium IT had changed their passwords on desktops or confiscated their laptops. They were allowed a half hour to collect personal items from their cubicles and told to leave the office. Security checked them at the door, collecting badges and checking their boxes for anything that looked like it might be company stuff and confiscated it.
Thank you for the free management seminar Big Mike. Imma use that. It's way more valuabel than the Ask-on-Tuesday-who-wants-what-for-the-free-lunch-on-Friday strategy...
I think a lot of those Twitter employees are pretending they are part of the early days of tech when people did sleep under their desks to get stock options.
Blogger Readering said..."Something tells me Mosk no long sees the elimination of bots as a priority."
Really? What tells you that?
Looks like a VERY obvious Photoshop. Chairs and other furniture much too large compared to the person. Fake news now, fake news forever!!!!
Jamie said ..
"I was flailing a lot of the time - not at all qualified to be a school administrator.) But that school was NOT going to go under on my watch. If dogged determination is something Musk is looking for, I would not be on the chopping block. But he'd be a fool to keep me on that basis, and he's not a fool."
This highlights the way start-ups require a person to be everything - teacher and administrator, probably plumber, psychiatrist, taxi-driver and nurse in a preschool. Now, is Twitter under Elon Musk a start-up or a renovation? Maybe it's like one of those videos showing a craftsman restoring an old piece of machinery, basically getting rid of embedded rust and old paint, but working to restore function. Twitter should be a way to communicate, not a chokepoint in communications run by leftys working off half-remembered scraps from Sociology 101 as taught at Oberlin. I'd like to see the three favorite books of those who get fired and those who do not. (Always the English major.)
Late to bed, and early to rise, make a productive day. Are they sleeping to avoid the commute? The many follies of urbanization in high-density parcels.
“Have you ever wondered why the non-military Federal government doesn't do a version of this? There is no reason they couldn't do a series of 10% per year RIFs over three to five years. The national economy would undoubtedly improve.“
A lot of reasons. One big reason is the way that federal employees are paid - if you work over 40 hours, you get either overtime or comp time. I worked on the 1980 Decennial Census as a programmer, and we did have fire drills. But they were always a hassle, due to the regulations and the like. You could carry maybe 80 hours of comp time over to the next year, couldn’t have more than 120 escrowed at any one time (I was over 200 at one point), and couldn’t accumulate more than 40 hours per 2 week pay period. We were constantly running up against these limits. Our division chief, or our deputy director had to approve many of the deviations. That was a problem, because most of his divisions worked on steady state problems. Sometimes it even had to go up to the Director.
Part of the problem in government work is that bad and incompetent employees are very hard to fire. Ultimately, our Decennial Census Division created a deadwood branch for them, to get them out of the way. Then, in the drawdown after the detailed Census was released lopped the deadwood branch off. But it was the federal government,and they all had Civil Service protections, which meant that they had bumping rights. The people that I came in with, as GS-7s, were now GS-12s, as were the deadwood, with far more seniority in grade. So, the people who had worked the 60 hour weeks for five years were laid off, and the ones who had taken on-the-job retirement took their jobs.
Continued
I got out of the government earlier than I expected. I found that I loved systems software. Then, it was mostly dealing in assembler code, which I was very good at. The Systems Software branch chief offered me a job. Whoops. Our Deputy Director talked to his, telling him that they could have me in three years. He mentioned it to a good friend of his, who was a supervisor at the vendor providing most of the computers. That guy interviewed me for a job. Since I was a federal government employee, he knew exactly what I was making, and what they could offer me (promotion to GS-11, step 1), and added 20%. I jumped at it, since I could do systems software, instead of brain dead applications programming, and make more money. Turned out that they initially put me on contract to NOAA, in the same building, in the next wing over on the next floor, to my job at Census. There we had some fire drills (you dropped everything and pulled all nighters, when the mainframe crashed). But over all, the pace was a lot less hectic. Eventually ended up at some benchmarks, for front end processors (which was essentially OS programming in assembler). A lot of all nighters, but I came out of them being an expert on the front end processor software, which opened up transferring to contracts with the USDA in Fort Collins, CO, back to an hour and a half from where I grew up. There I moved from the front end processors to protocol design and design of the software to run it. Great fun. By then, I was mostly working in C, which was good, because my code ended up running on IBM and Sperry mainframes, DEC and DG minicomputers, UNIX, and PCs. By the end, we had the biggest network of heterogeneous computers in the entire federal government.
The last three years, my (now ex) wife and I worked as 8A subcontractors, making a lot of money with little stress. She got another (CS) Master’s degree, and I got a JD. Then, the day after I graduated, the 8A contract was finished, and we were both unemployed. She stayed in the field, ultimately becoming a upper level EDP manager (despite being a very good programmer), while I ultimately became a patent attorney, where fire drills again became a way of life. Our daughter, after getting a STEM PhD, is with an engineering company, and thinks nothing of fire drills at work, having grown up watching both of her parents do them her entire life. No matter how hard you try, something very often comes up at the last minute unexpectedly, with a new product launch or install, and has to be addressed. The company that can’t, doesn’t get the business. They have a good system there, similar to what I had in Fort Collins, where work is loose, and you get freedom to take off work a bit here and there, until you can’t for a bit, and find yourself pulling all nighters. She got married a year ago, and they seem to have weddings somewhere in the country to attend every month. It works out well for her.
Fred Koch became one of the richest men in America. He opened a Wichita, Ks. office in the early 1920s not long after graduating from MIT. He lived in the office sleeping in a small backroom on a cot for years.
I am sitting here smiling imagining what would happen if Musk became President of Harvard, or Princeton, or any number of Universities. We would have a severe surplus of administrative types looking for work. Hurray!!!
I’ve been laid off and I’ve sat at the table where the decisions of who to lay off were made. Musk will keep Esther Crawford, or she’ll find someplace better to work.
I've done this many times, and I was a federal employee for a lot of my career. if you care about your job, you get it done. Some times my boss knew, some times he/she didn't. It all worked out, and, no one ever held a gun to my head.
“The phrase "raising 3 humans w/ @bobcowherd" is fascinating...“
Bob Cowherd appears to be the actual name of Esther Crawford’s husband, pictured together here. Looks like they exchanged their wedding vows at Burning Man. He also works in tech, used to be at Uber and Amazon, now doing something with crypto. There are no cows being herded, that I can find. I know, disappointing.
If one wants to start a big initiative like eliminating bots, the best way to start does not seem to be to lay off half the company workforce.
>>If one wants to start a big initiative like eliminating bots, the best way to start does not seem to be to lay off half the company workforce.
Getting back to the core business, and making sure everybody is rowing in the same direction is easier in 3500 person company than a 7000 person company.
You can be sure the remaining folks will find and delete the bots rather expeditiously, lest they get the axe in Round 2.
"If one wants to start a big initiative like eliminating bots, the best way to start does not seem to be to lay off half the company workforce."
If they're unproductive employees, seems like a good place to start.
"If one wants to start a big initiative like eliminating bots, the best way to start does not seem to be to lay off half the company workforce."
If they're unproductive employees, seems like a good place to start.
Joe Smith on names. I've recently noticed a number of Asian Americans with names like Marvin or Howard - the names that Jews born in NYC in the 1930's have. Have not seen an Irving yet.
Static Ping said...
There are lazy, grumpy, borderline mentally ill employees who generate great value to a company, and there are super determined, hard-working, cheerful, incompetent employees who should immediately be wished well in future endeavors. There are literally employees who steal from the company that are still more valuable than some well-meaning chap who has no idea what he is doing.
{here's gilbar's chance, to repeat some story he heard}...
There are 4 type of officers (according to some german dude)
1) Lazy and Stupid.. Don't worry about these, give them menial tasks and they'll be fine
2) Hardworking and Smart.. These make the best staff officers, give them all the work you can
3) Lazy and Smart.. THESE make the best Generals. They fine ways to get things done without over extension
FINALLY.. Type 4.. The Hardworking and Stupid.. FIND These; and REMOVE THEM, They are THE PROBLEM
I've Always been Proud to Be Lazy and Stupid.
I'll work enough to not get fired.. And i NEVER make extra work for people... EVER
Not a CEO but if I were, I wouldn't be overly concerned about where my employees slept when they're not working. What they were doing (and how well they were doing it) while working would matter more to me.
Sounds like a remake of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Succeed_in_Business_Without_Really_Trying_(musical)
Without the music, though.
readering said...
If one wants to start a big initiative like eliminating bots, the best way to start does not seem to be to lay off half the company workforce.
The people who were eagerly happy to be doing "customer censorship" for the last couple of years are NOT the people who are going to be good at hunting down bots
It'll be funny if they try to fire somebody for sleeping in the office, and he sues them because he's Japanese.
(Although if he's putting panties in the vending machine, he's probably going to lose that court case).
Where I work, you're not allowed to sleep on the job and you're not allowed to be in a work area if you are off the clock. During the pandemic, they actually put time clocks outside the employee entrances and put up signs saying, "You Must Be Cocked In to Enter." Then they set all the other time clocks inside the park to only allow you to swipe in and out from lunch. It actually says in the employee guidebook that sleeping on property can be a fireable offense.
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