I'm not a friend of Elon's, but outside of the flashiness of the whole thing, I don't think his firing spree was wholly unwarranted.
The other day I saw a video of a bunch of people at twitter leaving that have been there for a decade or so. I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.
Restructuring is done on whatever idea the new owner(s) have in plan - which could be equally disconnected from "real product".
I'm not that optimistic about Twitter long term - never was TBH but this Musk thing is turning to a shitshow and also exposes what it's like working for him in his other companies.
I'm staying and I'm glad the teams are trimmed.
Absolutely. I also realize that when a company reaches the firing squad stage it's not a good idea to stick around - better polish up the CV and move to greener pastures. I have no insider information - they could be offering generous (and credible) retention bonuses for critical staff, but I've seen this happen twice before indirectly (I was gone before it started happening) and the people that stayed didn't have a good time, were lied to and left in the end anyway in a worse situation (or waited trough to bankruptcy and had to sue for outstanding wages in first place I worked in)
On the other hand the slash and burn Elon approach seems objectively terrible. Indiscriminately firing most of the company kills morale and is likely to send the company into a hiring death spiral where your good employees leave and you can't attract good talent. This won't automatically kill the product or the company but it's not going to lend itself to big positive successes in the future.
This is honestly uncalled for. Job hopping every 2-3yrs should not be an expected task.
Changing jobs is a skill/knowledge net-negative for the employer, and can be negative (outside of salary) for the employee as they have to relearn everything (relationships, tech debt, processes) etc.
What is wrong with that?
Very few industries require constant learning for the business to compete so a highly tenured employee likely hasn’t learned anything new beyond minute process changes for 10+ years. Once people are ossified into a role like that, they will do anything and everything to shut down anything that has a whiff of threatening their current role.
Some were resisting change. Some were embracing it. All in all, I had a great time and gained a lot of respect. I love working in teams with all ages.
Your sentence "once people are ossified..." feels like a generalization to me.
German here. I think this actually is a huge part of the success of the famous Mittelstand - all that institutional knowledge these people have is extremely valuable. It's not just basic stuff like "know time tracking, billing and other admin systems and internal processes", but also the stuff that really can speed up your work: whom to ask on the "kurzer Dienstweg" aka short-circuitting bureaucracy when needed, personal relationships with people in other departments on whose knowledge you rely (it's one thing if you get a random email asking for some shit from someone you don't know, but I'll always find some minutes to help out someone who has helped me out in the past), all the domain-specific knowledge about the precise needs and desires of your customers...
Attrition is bad for a company as a whole, the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact), and so there is no KPI for leadership other than attrition rate itself.
The only problem is that over the last years, employers' mindset has shifted from regular wage raises to paying the bare minimum which makes changing jobs every few years a virtual requirement for employees to get raises, and so we are already seeing the first glimpses of US employment culture and its issues cropping up.
This is false. People invest on many year horizons all of the time when they believe in the company. If there was good evidence that having an average tenure of 5+ years was a great boost to the company, people would clamor to invest in companies like that.
This was basically Google’s entire pitch when they were an early public company. Happy employees == great things. I remember when 60 minutes or dateline did some special about google before 2010 and people were floored by how good the employees got it. However, hiring standards relaxed and now google is slowly rotting from the inside to realize it’s the new IBM.
Long tenure alone is absolutely not an advantage. It’s very easy to have a bunch of dead weight that just looks like they know what’s going on.
So back to your point about experience mattering. That should show up in customer satisfaction, project turnaround speed, success rates, etc. Otherwise it’s pretty meaningless. And guess who already measures those KPIs…
The perfect example of why that is not the case at least in Silicon Valley is Google and their messengers and social networks... just how many of them exist(ed)? Four? Five? Each of them was someone's promotion project, left to languish, suffer and eventually die afterwards. Honestly it's a wonder Gmail and Maps are still around, their UI hasn't been updated much in ages despite obvious potential for improvements... I guess the only reason why they are alive is that they generate absurd amounts of data.
Granted, but they usually have the option to sell at many points along the way.
Think about an alternative financial instrument. What if you could invest $X in a public company (and get a higher rate of return because of the higher risk) but you lose the ability to sell until five years have passed?
This is one kind of option that might be worth trying. I want to see more mechanisms promoting long-term investment in our public markets. (Bonds are not identical to what I described BTW.)
The lack of these kinds of options (sure, bonds exist but I've not noticed them used with any notable significance in public companies) is why people talk about the short term quarterly focus of Wall Street.
It's also not necessarily a disadvantage. The real argument is that people management is important. Everyone from the new person who just joined to the decade long senior engineer need to be held to high standards. Which brings me to my next point.
The big problem with Twitter was management. Dorsey was barely a CEO for many years. Parag didn't seem to want to try anything. I think people routinely underestimate how important good leaders are. "There are no bad teams, only bad leaders" comes to mind. So far Elon has shown himself to be terrible in this regard. With SpaceX and Tesla he communicated a vision, with Twitter he's communicated very little and just instituted chaos.
This is true, and in my opinion, true for a reason. And that reason is not "most huge companies are dumb", as opposed to what Musk's cult seem to believe. The reality is, measuring what exactly is "bloat" and precisely cutting that bloat is extremely difficult and firing more than half of your workforce is probably like using a warhammer to do brain surgery.
But while fighting the entropy can be hard, not doing so is almost certain to be lethal.
If an organism is infected by gangrene or cancer (the more extreme forms of entropy for a body), it may be more realistic to cut away whole body parts than to treat it in place, even if there is risk of sudden death.
It seems to em that this is what Musk is trying. Either Twitter will be gone within a year, or they may very well be sustainably profitable within 2-3 years.
If your company is losing money all this time you are likely to be fired eventually in the real world. Job security in sw world had become so high that no one seemed to expect it. Everyone assumed “sure we’re losing money and the company has no direction” but all is fine.
They all stayed there in their tables working for 10 years in a rudderless company as if it was a government job.
The only reason Twitter is in deep financial shit right now is because Elon acquired it in a leveraged buyout and the cost of servicing the debt is estimated around 1B/year.
Something I learned early in my career is that some companies consider this a feature not a bug. As in, they are hoarding talent so that they don't go to work for their competitor.
