Musk's latest edict stinks of desperation

Originally published at: Musk's latest edict stinks of desperation | Boing Boing

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If I worked there:

Goodbye GIF

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Management by FUD. I can’t wait until he decides to run for office.

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Twitter must have some interesting recruiting booths at job fairs.

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Gunna pay them to leave? Great

See Ya Goodbye GIF by PUMA

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I’m honestly surprised he did the 3 months instead of just “my way or the highway”.

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  1. I want to see the form and what it actually says (ETA 'cos if it varies my terms of employment arbitrarily, I ain’t clicking)
  2. Isn’t this constructive dismissal? (OK - may be an alien concept in large parts of US - but when you have a contract of employment, being sacked if you miss a memo or fail to click something is at risk of ending up in front of a tribunal over here, I suspect.)
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My guess is that it might already be part of their employment contract, getting the severance. Pretty sure Musk would prefer to leave fired employees with nothing

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Loyalty Oaths have long been a staple of the fascists. I suspect that the form includes an “I will not express disparaging thoughts regarding Glorious Leader Elon” clause.

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Is it legal to renegotiate someone’s labor contract via social media?

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Apparently, Musk believes the word “hardcore” is really cool. As I recall, even when it was in wide usage, it wasn’t that cool.

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Hmmm hang around, be beaten up by a man child who clearly doesn’t respect you with the vague promise of receiving devalued stock options at some point in the future - assuming there is a future, or take three months severance and leave now while there’s still some cash in the pot?

Tough choice.

Edit: Also isn’t this a substantial rewriting of an employment contract under threat of dismissal? Is this legal in the US?

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Oh man, I can imagine lots of wonderful ways this plays out.

Imagine if even 50% of employees opt out. The remaining few will demand huge raises to work those ridiculous long hours. Or else they will quickly opt out too.

It will be poor ol’ Elon, the Head Twit, alone in the silent halls of Twitter HQ.

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I remember when “hardcore” and “working late” was just another category on PornHub.

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This will mean working long hours at high intensity.

With a commensurate raise in salary, right Elon? Because my “hardcore” attitude would be “f*ck you, pay me!”

As discussed in another Topic, he’s also chosen this perfect moment to declare that the free meals that are the standard at big cool tech companies (and a more subtle way of encouraging long unpaid hours) are over at Twitter.

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Very much NO.

Something something and the horse you rode in on, Muskrat.

Muskie couldn’t pay me nearly enough for me to work under him. I’ve had two toxic bosses in my working career, I’m dropping a marker and calling that my limit.

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Not an expert but i would presume that Musk could drum up the excuse that a given employee is unwilling to do assigned tasks or hit certain metrics and allowing him to dismiss them. That said on paper he might think this absolves him of responsibility but its probably the kind of thing that can be fought in court.

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Almost all states in the US are what’s known as At Will Employment states, including California where Twitter is based. This means employees can leave for any reason, and more importantly, employers can fire you with no reason given and no notice.

I’m often surprised how few Americans I worked with when I was there understood this. The company can literally fire you without saying why at any time. People think they have protections for various things, but the company doesn’t have to give a reason. Maybe it’s because you’re Jewish and a woman, but they won’t say that, so it’s on you after the fact to prove that’s why you were fired (which is immensely difficult). Short of finding an internal email saying “we’re firing Janice because she’s a female [Jewish expletive]”, almost nobody succeeds.

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This is an… interesting way of doing things.

It looks like the standard sort of buy-out that companies do when they want to reduce staff but don’t want to tank morale by laying people off. (Then they always get surprised when they realize that the people who can find jobs elsewhere have taken the buyout, and the people who are bad at their jobs and would struggle to find a new one are staying on.)

The twist here is that the layoffs were done first. That makes the buy-out even more appealing than it would be otherwise.

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From what I’ve heard, dunno if this is true, from others, it’s 12 hour days, 7 days a week, for the next 3 to 6 months. No PTO, no holidays.

People don’t join twitter to do crunch time and make less per hour than an entry level engi or prolific door-dasher. They joined twitter to work on high availability scala. That high availability scala is wanted at a LOT of other places, and those places are ready to get people in by December 30, and would love to do so. And this is after they’ve already been paid out for their RSUs and options.

I might be wrong but I can see 2/3rds to 3/4ths of engis walking away.

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