Elon Musk’s Brutally Honest Management Style reminded me of a line from this think piece from way back:
“…soft and sentimental people– particularly the chair-bound geek variant– often idolize brutality.”
Category: Current Events
Choose wisely.
It’s official: Elon Musk sent out an email to the remaining staff at Twitter, offering them this choice…
- Stay and be “hardcore,” committing to long hours at high intensity, where “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” or
- Leave and take three months’ salary.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog and a fan of Star Wars: Andor, you already know which choice I recommend.
The whole mess started with this Tweet:
This should have been something like “We’re working on Android performance issues, and you should see improvements in the coming weeks/months,” but that’s not Elon’s style. This was a combination of management by shame and a little red meat for his fanboys.
I myself have delivered working software that was later know-nothingly criticized by a pointy-haired boss, so I understand former Twitter developer Eric Frohnhoefer’s response…
…which led to this Twitter exchange, where Eric defends the team and points out the work they’ve done to improve the Android client. It’s an even-tempered response…
One of Elon’s fanboys — or at least a fanboy-adjacent person — decided to re-ask a question that Elon asked earlier and which wasn’t answered in Eric’s series of tweets, and again, Eric responded matter-of-factly:
Adn that’s when we got our fanboy moment:
On the urging of users, without any apparent managerial or HR review, Eric Frohnhoefer was fired.
We’ve gone from this…
…to this:
You’ve probably already guessed that @Langdon’s Twitter account now looks like this:
Reporter Cyrus Farivar (an online friend) talked to Eric, and the firing had all the characteristics of current Twitter:
In fact, Eric’s confirmation of his dismissal came in the form of being locked out of his company laptop:
Now about that brilliant move I mentioned in this post’s title…
Under normal circumstances, contradicting the boss in a public forum is a bad idea. But these are not normal circumstances.
This is a boss who’s happy to grind his employees with overwork (I have friends who’ve worked at his companies), treat them like 19th century factory workers, and fire people for working from home during the 2020 pandemic. He’s taken over Twitter without a real plan, slashed the workforce with more thought about cost-cutting than actually running the place, and is telling people close to the code that he knows more than them.
We’ve seen this kind of unearned intellectual overconfidence before:
This is not a workplace you want to be in. It is toxic. And it’s not worth the effort. As a Twitter employee, you really have just two options:
- Quit.
- Be fired.
Under normal circumstances, option 1 is the preferable one. But these are not normal circumstances.
Getting fired by Elon under these circumstances, given what is publicly known (and who know what we don’t know yet, but the smart money says it’s much worse) is a badge of honor. You get:
- Points for courage for standing up to the world’s biggest and richest pointy-haired boss.
- Points for integrity for standing up for the Android development team, and defending them in an even-tempered manner.
- Sympathy points for taking on a no-win David vs. Goliath battle.
Someone from the Reddit team has already reached out to Eric about a senior Android development position, and I’m certain that it’s just one of many communications about an open position that he’s received.
Godspeed and good luck in your job search, Eric.
In the meantime…
Brilliant.
The inspirational speech that Kino Loy (played by Andy Serkis) at the end of episode 10 of Star Wars: Andor was meant to inspire the prisoners to break out of the Narkina 5 prison labor camp. However, with only a few changes, it could easily be an inspirational message that someone could send on the Twitter company Slack to the remaining employees.
With the news that Twitter has slashed its contractor workforce by about 80% to 1,000 people, there are now about 5,000 people working at Twitter, which is the same as the number prisoners on Narkina 5. This additional coincidence should make the speech even more applicable.
🚨 Spoiler warning for those of you who haven’t yet seen episode 10 of Star Wars: Andor!
“My name is Kino Loy. I’m the day shift manager on Level Five. I’m speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.”
“How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold.”
“Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge, and start climbing. They don’t have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it’ll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want.”
“We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what’s happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die…and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill!”
“You need to help each other. You see someone who’s confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we’ve been working, we will be home in no time. One way out! One way out! One way out!”