More on the Twitter Lay Offs

Good day all. As he promised, Elon Musk has taken a chain saw to the Twitter employee head count and has started the layoffs. The rumors were that the layoffs would begin on Friday, November 4^th, and they did. Apparently, entire teams were let go, and that the group that censors conservatives or post things that go against the Progressives doctrine were locked out of their tools.

There was also a report that a group of Twitlers also are suing under the “Warn Act” to stop the layoffs. (That suit is probably going nowhere fast since it’s aimed ore toward blue collar jobs, not professional jobs) It looks like the goal is to cut about 50% of the current staff. It also seems that for every coder/developer, there are something like 10 managers. (Talk about top heavy) Here are the details from The Verge:

Elon Musk has now purged roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employee base, leaving whole teams totally or near completely gutted, including those tasked with defending against election misinformation ahead of the US midterms next week, The Verge has learned.

The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams, according to tweets by laid-off employees and people familiar with the matter. More company leaders, including Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering, and Tony Haile, a senior director of product overseeing Twitter’s work with news publishers, have also been laid off following Musk’s firings of Twitter’s senior leadership last week.

There is a lot to unwind here obviously. It does look like Musk intends to make good on making Twitter more of a Free Speech platform instead of the Politically Correct, Woke platform it is now. While I don’t have the details, obviously, I suspect that Musk intends to reverse the current management structure to be “More privates and a lot less generals.”

Given the sweeping nature of Musk’s layoffs and his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting, employees who remain at Twitter told The Verge that they expect the company to have a hard time maintaining critical infrastructure in the short term. “Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, while another called management’s layoff process “an absolute shit show.”

Musk’s cuts began Thursday evening, shortly after an unsigned memo was sent internally confirming the company would “go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce.” Impacted employees quickly realized they were locked out of their work accounts well before they were notified of their job status by another unsigned email titled “Your Role at Twitter.”

Layoffs suck, and there is no two ways about it. I’ve been on the receiving end of a layoff, (Although not a mass layoff), and on the technical end. In the latter case, I was notified a good day in advanced and provided with a list of people who were being let go and the timeline to deactivate all their access. As to the title of Your Role at Twitter, I’m sure it had a lot of verbiage in it, but it all boils down to “You no longer have a role at Twitter. Goodbye and have a nice day.” At least those let go will get a fairly decent severance package. I understand it’s at least two months pay and benefits.

Meanwhile, employees in other countries have been notified that their roles have been “identified as potentially impacted or at risk of redundancy” and that they should continue to abide by company policies until more information is shared. The employee FAQ says that “roughly 50% of the workforce will be impacted” by the layoffs, confirming a discussion that was accidentally made visible inside Twitter’s Slack two days ago.

I heard a rumor that the entire staff in Ireland found that they were locked out of their office and told to go home until further notice.

Employees who weren’t laid off on Friday received a separate email to their work addresses saying that the company’s internal directory, Birdhouse, and office badge access would be shut off until Monday, November 7th.

Some Twitter employees have already filed a lawsuit against the company claiming that the company violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) and California’s WARN Act, which requires that companies give at least 60 days of notice before a mass firing. Others told The Verge they are consulting their lawyers about the discrepancy between Musk’s one-month of severance and what he agreed to pay before the merger.

As I understand it, and I am by no means knowledgeable on the WARN act or labor laws, that if the severance packages cover everything for two months, then there isn’t an issue. (Or much of one), Of course, once the time window passes, you are escorted out with 2 weeks and a “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” As to the actual amounts? I have no idea. We will find out eventually of course. I don’t think the lawsuit will work either. As I mentioned earlier, it was aimed at blue collar factory workers who’s jobs were being shipped to China.

One major issue for all the now former Twitter workers is sympathy. They aren’t getting much, certainly not from me. There is a meme running loose that is a direct hit on the laid off Twitter workers. It goes:

Dear Twitter employees,
Just go find another job; just like you told us to do!
Sincerely
Keystone Pipeliners.

As you can see, a lot of people have had it with Big Tech in general and Twitter in particular. When it was announced that Elon Musk was going to buy the company, the screams from the left were seen as amusing, especially from all those who had their accounts forcibly closed for not following the Progressive doctrine. Now that it’s happening, the general response has been “Good!” We wish all the former Twitlers good luck in their new jobs working in the coal mines.

Thatisall

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