[dirheist]

Those being laid off for cause are the 3 senior level executives (the old CEO, the lead counsel, and the content policy head). Those 3 had a 100+ million cumulative severance package which they are now no longer eligible to receive, although none of them are strapped for cash.

[saurik]

Elsewhere in this thread, people are discussing a potentially-credible (but maybe you disagree) report on this from Gergely Orosz that does not paint this as "only the 3 senior executives".

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1587042365084209153?...

> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.

[nharada]

I don't understand why so many people celebrate when Elon treats his underlings like trash. Is it because people hate Twitter and think if you work there you deserve this? Is it because they want to have Elon's level of power and fame where the rules don't apply to them? Something else?

[prions]

Because the aggrieved aren’t satisfied only by Elon taking over twitter and taking it in a different direction, they also believe that those currently at twitter deserve harsh punishment for whatever role they had in twitter.

[PixyMisa]

Correct.

[boruto]

Imagine if this was Ellison, HN would be going bonkers. Now that it is musk, lot of comments saying it is fine and dandy.

[potatolicious]

The cruelty is the point with authoritarians.

Also one perennial observation with authoritarian-friendly people is that in their dog-eat-dog fantasy they are the badass warlord sitting atop a pile of bones rather than the nameless goon that lies at the bottom of the bonepile.

[fzeroracer]

All of the above, plus a fair bit of delusion. The amount of people I've seen pretending to be engineers in order to normalize the most ridiculous things he says or does has been growing and when pressed they often just vanish or stop responding.

That said, should Twitter eventually fall apart it will never be the fault of Musk. It will be because insiders preventing his vision, or the government blocked him, or any number of excuses.

[aljungberg]

Hasn’t it been a popular topic on here of how bloated Twitter’s staff seems to be given how little the platform has apparently changed over the years? Not taking a stance on that, I don’t know, but to that cohort of commenters this probably seems like victory for common sense.

[xeromal]

Probably the same reason people watch drama TV and soaps. It's entertainment

[lupire]

But why are they cheering for the villain?

[xeromal]

Loads of people like negative drama. Housewives, Love is Blind, 90 day fiance are all full of really terrible shitty people.

[datalopers]

> they are now no longer eligible to receive

Musk doesn't meet the cause outlined in their employment contracts. They'll get their executive early termination severance but it'll require some legal action first.

[prepend]

What cause is outlined in their employment contracts?

Do they even have employment contracts?

[gaadd33]

Yep they are filed with the SEC, you can see one of them here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312521...

[fishtoaster]

The average engineer has an employment contract. It would be incredibly surprising if the CEO, lead counsel, and content policy head did not.

[sulam]

Taylor Leese is a respected Twitter engineering manager who tweeted on Sunday that he was no longer working at Twitter. While it's remotely conceivable that he quit, it's much more likely he was fired.

I had reports from friends who worked there that they were asked to stay available over the weekend, presumably for situations like this, or requests from the "war room" group that has been setup.

[vxNsr]

What is an engineering manager as it relates to actually writing code?

One of the things Elon said was that there appears to be 3 managers for every engineer. I understand the need for a few PMs but if there really was a 3:1 ratio that’s just absurd.

[ryanwaggoner]

Actually, he said there are 10 managers for every engineer who codes, but I don’t know why anyone would take anything he says seriously at this point.

[itronitron]

My understanding of Twitter is that it has, or used to have, many internal teams that do 'social media consultancy projects' for prospective clients presumably to facilitate ad campaigns. In that case I would expect everyone on those teams to have manager as a job title, much like 'director' in design firms.

[sulam]

There is literally no chance that Twitter has 10 engineering managers for every engineer. That is simply absurd. i worked there for over 4 years, and the ratio then was very comparable to every other tech company I've worked at, including large ones like Google and smaller ones (then) like Salesforce.

Maybe more interesting, there are a lot of roles that have "manager" in the name somehow. Product Manager is the obvious one, Program Managers exist, and I'm sure there are others, not to mention that every function has managers in one shape or form if they're at all scaled out -- there's managers for designers, lawyers, accountants, etc at a fairly predictable ratio at every company I've worked at.

Amusingly, Twitter was one of the most manager-lite companies I ever worked at when I started. In 2011 the ratio was a lot closer to 50:1 than it was 1:10.

Perhaps Musk is simply taking everyone with manager in their role and implying they're managing other people. This is not the case and is willfully misrepresenting people's work if so. Par for the course for this guy, though.

[mandevil]

I think that at this point, taking something Elon Musk says- especially about Twitter!- as having any sort of relationship to truth is the thing that's absurd.

[bradleybuda]

> although none of them are strapped for cash

Does this mean that they have or deserve different rights under contract law than others do? What if their counterparty is even less "strapped for cash"?

[prepend]

It’s not an excuse to treat people poorly, but I certainly have less empathy for someone who has $5M in vested stock who gets fired vs someone who makes $15/hour and lives paycheck to paycheck.

Both are injustices. The former isn’t much of a risk to life. The latter could literally result in life or death situations.

[themitigating]

Selective empathy is on the path to becoming a sociopath

[prepend]

Relative empathy is part of being a regular human being.

If someone has 10 lollipops and loses 1, that’s not “selective empathy” to feel differently than about someone else who has 1 lollipop and loses everything.

[themitigating]

One job one person, the rest is all assumptions. How much they made, their stock options, financial situation. Maybe they are paying for their nephews cancer treatment or something.

[hyperpape]

Matt Levine has a good explanation (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-31/elon-m...), which is that they receive a golden parachute for a simple reason. Their self-interest was to say "la-la-la, we can't hear you" when Musk comes trying to buy Twitter. That would've given them a chance to maintain high paid positions for years. Instead, they sold to him, knowing they'd probably be given the boot.

Now, at some level, it still stinks that the CEO is getting paid so many tens of millions of dollars for less than a year's worth of work. To solve that, you'd have to cut CEO pay in the first place, because just removing the parachute would incentivize clinging to their existing paychecks.

[freejazz]

The board decided to sell, not the C-level suite because they do not have that power.

[rst]

Parag Agrawal, as CEO, was also a member of the board. (This is pretty common practice, among both private and public companies.)

[iav]

The C suite has an incredible amount of influence to block a deal with a non-strategic acquirer like Elon. The threat of all executives resigning en masse can knee cap a business.

[freejazz]

That's true, but it wasn't the question.

[smcl]

What was the question? I don’t see any

[smcl]

That Matt Levine article in archive.ph: https://archive.ph/JrNdE

[theGnuMe]

It would be funny if the cause was "selling Twitter to Musk". :)

[ummonk]

Genghis Khan vibes

[make3]

"which they are now no longer eligible to receive" I would 100% assume that they will sue

[peter303]

Musk's purchase premium increased their stock value a considerable amount.