It’s official: Elon Musk sent out an email to the remaining staff at Twitter, offering them this choice…
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:
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:
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:
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…
Tallahassee is the capital of the state of Florida, and it’s also the home of Domi Station, Tallahassee’s business incubator, coworking space, event venue, general all-round supporter of startups in the area, and friend of this blog (they were a host for StartupBus Florida when we passed through earlier this year). Domi Station is also the home of Startup Week Tallahassee, which happens this week!
And the events are FREE TO ATTEND!
The event is the Tallahassee edition of Techstars Startup Week, a week-long event celebrating entrepreneurship and the startup community. Startup Week features speakers and events to inspire, inform, and introduce people who share an entrepreneurial spirit.
Startup Week Tallahassee 2022 takes place this week, November 14th through 18th at three locations (including Domi Station) and will have 12 tracks focused on different industries:
If you’re in Tallahassee or nearby, check out Startup Week Tallahassee! Find out more at their site.
Brilliant.
The New York Times published a story today announcing that Amazon will lay off thousands of employees this week — possibly as many as 10,000. This is similar to the number of people that Facebook laid off.
If you’re one of these people, you have my sympathy. I’ve gone through four layoffs myself, and I have some tips to share below.
As a FAANG/MANGA company, Amazon has serious “street cred” among recruiters and hiring managers. Emphasize the “Amazon” item on your resume, mention it in your LinkedIn headline…
…and play up your Amazon experience in interviews.
Facebook/Meta has the outgoing employee tradition of the “badge post” where you write a farewell post on their internal portal. When the big layoff happened last week, many laid-off Facebookers/Metamates posted similar posts onto LinkedIn, complete with a photo of their badge (the photo side has just the person’s photo and name, which are already on their LinkedIn profile).
These generated a lot of sympathy, re-connected a lot of people who’d lost touch, and from the comments to these posts, also got a lot of attention from recruiters, hiring managers, and other people who either were trying to fill positions or knew of open ones.
Once the initial shock of getting laid off has worn off, write and post an “Amazon badge post” — along with a photo of your badge — on LinkedIn as soon as possible. Don’t forget to add the “Open to Work” indicator to your profile photo!
Do this sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more “badge posts” will be out there, and you don’t want to get lost among the multitude.
Every company, once it gets big enough, has at least one alumni group founded by former employees for networking and finding new jobs. Amazon is no exception, and you should look into the following:
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!”
On Saturday, November 12th, a number of Twitter contractors found out that they were let go. Many of them didn’t find out by being told so; they found out by trying to log into their systems and seeing something like this:
I found out about this via someone on Mastodon, which led me to this tweet from Casey Newton of Platformer, who’s been providing some of the best coverage of Twitter under Elon Musk’s disastrous “leadership”:
Getting word that a large number of number of Twitter contractors were just laid off this afternoon with no notice, both in the US and abroad. Functions affected appear to include content moderation, real estate, and marketing, among others— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 13, 2022
At least one contractor learned the news from Casey’s tweet:
Even more worrisome was the importance of the work that some of these contractors were doing:
This just happened to me. I work(ed) in content moderation in political misinformation. — Melissa Ingle (@mingle74) November 13, 2022
It’s hard to find out why Twitter did such a thing because among the people who got laid off in last week’s 50% staff reduction were almost all of Twitter’s communications staff. There simply isn’t anyone to talk to.
Laying off contractors sounds like a fairly painless cost-cutting move, but it’s not necessarily so. The key part of “contractor” is its root word — contract. Ending a contract suddenly and early is often expensive, because contracts typically have an end date and usually list financial penalties for cancelling the contract before that end date.
As Ina Fried points out in her article on Axios, Twitter contractors have been “in limbo” thanks to the massive cuts in full-time staff:
There’s no reason to treat people this way, but this is the way Musk does things, and his fans are lapping this up, since they see this as some kind of revenge-by-proxy against people they see as “undeserving”. As Adam Serwer put it in his article about Trump fans, whose circle in the Venn diagram overlaps a lot with the one for Musk fans, The Cruelty is the Point.
Even from the most coldly pragmatic, Machiavellian angle, it’s time to get ready to ditch Twitter. Never mind the ethical stance of not supporting a Musk endeavor; every day is bringing some new action of Musk’s that further undermines the company, either financially or technologically. They’ve let go of a lot of key people, and those who “dodged the axe” are making their own plans to leave. Twitter is imploding, and if you like have a microblogging home, it’s time to find a new one.
Given the available options, Mastodon’s your best bet.
Don’t forget that there’s a Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer meetup this Wednesday, where you can talk to me about Mastodon!