Elon Musk is a nice chap

[james_s]

Yup. As I mentioned, this is a pretty common event. But it's apparently very bad because it is Musk. If it's one of the "approved" guys, then it's just normal business and bad luck.
When a company lays off thousands of employees, it is never pretty. The methods used are often just as ugly, if not worse.

That isn't it at all. Meta had close to 80,000 and laid off 11,000, that's not great but it's a business reality, they grew too fast and invested billions in a platform (the metaverse) that so far has been a complete flop.

Twitter had 7500 and laid off 3500, with a huge number resigning on top of that, and it appears to have been done in a reckless fashion by a brand new CEO who can't possibly have figured out this quickly what everyone there is or was doing. When Meta lays off 40,000 people and another 20,000 resign in the following weeks we can start to talk equivalency. I could be wrong of course, but I suspect Twitter will come crashing down, having lost a critical mass of employees and on top of that, huge numbers of users and advertisers.

[floobydust]

[...]
So I'm not seeing anything worth the sweatshop experience. It will be the usual panic, rush, push in a disorganized mess that gives programmers Stockholm Syndrome.

Is Twitter able to issue useful stock options to the employees?  By "useful" I mean ones that have a real potential of becoming valuable?  If so, there's your incentive.  I've personally worked many 80-hour weeks and invested huge amounts of my energy at a couple of startups.  One was a minor success, the other a huge winner.  Both were valuable experiences for me, financially and career-wise. 

Even without the stock-options sometimes a good salary, experience, and connections can be very rewarding, even if there are long hours and no big stock-option-lottery payoff.

Twitter was delisted from the NYSE Nov. 8 and merged into Musk's X Holdings II Inc. making it a private co.  I believe.
It's highly dangerous to work for Twitter I would think, it costs a person to set up a life in SF and the higher cost of living erases any higher salary. When you add in the instability of the bull in the china shop and sweatshop work ethic, I'm not seeing the glory.
When I've worked 80-hour weeks, I realized I had a pile of cash yet was exhausted and miserable, I could not enjoy that money. A defining moment.

Households in South Africa have servants for everything, and through my friend I found they aren't treated the best and the result is a view of other people as lower worth.
Does Musk value his employees, appreciate them?

[james_s]

Also they have much higher credit score than you because banks like when you take so much debt you can barely repay. They are the most profitable customers for banks.

No they don't. My credit score was 840 when I checked a year ago. It's not even possible to get "much higher" than that, the scale tops out at 850.

The banks like them more than me because the banks profit off of them and lose money serving me but that doesn't mean their credit score is higher.

[wraper]

No they don't. My credit score was 840 when I checked a year ago. It's not even possible to get "much higher" than that, the scale tops out at 850.

From your post:

I drove a $500 car for 17 years...

I had an impression you had no significant debt. But I guess you have, otherwise such credit score would be impossible.

[coppice]

The women will generally quit through family commitments and the blacks and many whites generally don't like to work long hours.

That's not really the case. In many professions there is an attrition of women in their early 30s, as they realise if they don't have children now they never will. However, engineering, including software engineering, is different. The number of women who start in serious R&D engineering is fairly small, but within a couple of years most have moved out to do related activities, like technical sales and marketing. The number of men content to work on their own staring at documents for 6 out of their daily 7 or 8 working hours is not great, so R&D is a niche attraction for men. However, for women the number is extremely small.

Long hours is mostly a bogus issue, because people don't compare like to like. When you look the time people in China spend between leaving for work in the morning and getting back at night its a lot greater than in Europe or America. However, when you work with them, and see how much their days are broken up, the total hours of serious effort is not that much greater. Its just a different style of life. They aren't supermen. They still get exhausted by sustained effort.

[AndyBeez]

It would be interesting to know how many of those are here on H1B visas. At a place I used to work there were a few of those and I was friends with one, he said his visa was sponsored by the company and if he lost his job he had to find another company to sponsor him within a period of time or he would be deported back to India. They are practically indentured servants, a company can treat them poorly and they have little recourse short of returning to their home country.

H1B Visas - I looked that up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa

I feel their pain. Serving a tour of duty in the USA for an income far beyond what their degree will earn them in their native country is possibly a price worth paying. Especially if there is a chance of a permanent Green Card. It's either work 80 hour weeks in Silicon Valley or, go shovel concrete in Abu Dhabi.

However, for indigenous wage slaves, an interesting paragraph from the Wiki notes:

A 2016 study found that H-1B visas kept wages for U.S. computer scientists 2.6% to 5.1% lower, and employment in computer science for U.S. workers 6.1% to 10.8% lower, but resulted in greater production efficiency, lowered the prices of IT products, raised the output of IT products and caused substantially higher profits for IT firms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Wage_depression

Explains why some business have a diversity preference.

[ The same might be said of the biotech sector, except it's MEN in biotech who are an under represented group ]

[james_s]

No they don't. My credit score was 840 when I checked a year ago. It's not even possible to get "much higher" than that, the scale tops out at 850.

From your post:

I drove a $500 car for 17 years...

I had an impression you had no significant debt. But I guess you have, otherwise such credit score would be impossible.

You missed that I bought my house when I was 25, which was the whole reason I brought up being thrifty. Despite having a modest income at the time and having to pull some strings to get approved I bought a house that I'm about a year from having paid off. Priorities.

[Bud]

Also they have much higher credit score than you because banks like when you take so much debt you can barely repay. They are the most profitable customers for banks.

No they don't. My credit score was 840 when I checked a year ago. It's not even possible to get "much higher" than that, the scale tops out at 850.

The banks like them more than me because the banks profit off of them and lose money serving me but that doesn't mean their credit score is higher.

Credit score is customer's ability to Return money, not to Take money.
I pay my credit card balance every two weeks and do not pay any interest, yet my credit rating is high.

[wraper]

Credit score is customer's ability to Return money, not to Take money.
I pay my credit card balance every two weeks and do not pay any interest, yet my credit rating is high.

Not really. You can have a loads of money in many banks, high-paying job and ridiculously low credit score if you don't have any credits on you and don't at least use credit cards. Closing large debt can instantly reduce your credit score by a lot, so better take a next one before ending the previous. Thankfully there is no such nonsense in EU.

[james_s]

Not really. You can have a loads of money in many banks, high-paying job and ridiculously low credit score if you don't have any credits on you and don't at least use credit cards. Closing large debt can instantly reduce your credit score by a lot, so better take a next one before ending the previous. Thankfully there is no such nonsense in EU.

Obviously you have to have some credit in order to build a credit score, but it is really a matter of taking some debt and paying back what you borrowed reliably that results in a high credit score. The whole point of a credit score is to measure how reliably a person can be trusted to pay back money that they borrow.

[Bud]

This ^^^

[Bud]

. Closing large debt can instantly reduce your credit score by a lot

This is absurd. There is no such nonsense in North America.

[wraper]

. Closing large debt can instantly reduce your credit score by a lot

This is absurd. There is no such nonsense in North America.

https://www.cnbc.com/select/does-paying-off-debt-change-credit-score/

[EEVblog]

Twitter was delisted from the NYSE Nov. 8 and merged into Musk's X Holdings II Inc. making it a private co.  I believe.
It's highly dangerous to work for Twitter I would think, it costs a person to set up a life in SF and the higher cost of living erases any higher salary. When you add in the instability of the bull in the china shop and sweatshop work ethic, I'm not seeing the glory.

The glory is earning a butt load of money, working on top notch tech and problems and working with other top notch people in a competitive environment. And then having it on your resume for the rest of your career. And being on such a (now) small-ish team you'll likely be able to say you personally worked with Elon Musk.
"Instability" doesn't matter to a single person in the their 20's.

IMO if you are a young single hot shot programmer/network tech type person with talent and drive, there are far worse places to work.

When I've worked 80-hour weeks, I realized I had a pile of cash yet was exhausted and miserable, I could not enjoy that money. A defining moment.

Not everyone is the same. Some people thrive on this environment, and they can enjoy that money at the same time.

[EEVblog]

Twitter had 7500 and laid off 3500, with a huge number resigning on top of that, and it appears to have been done in a reckless fashion by a brand new CEO who can't possibly have figured out this quickly what everyone there is or was doing. When Meta lays off 40,000 people and another 20,000 resign in the following weeks we can start to talk equivalency. I could be wrong of course, but I suspect Twitter will come crashing down, having lost a critical mass of employees and on top of that, huge numbers of users and advertisers.

I've made a public bet with Chris Gammell that won't happen.

[EEVblog]

As to employment, a thought. Haven't we been told that a lot of the more traditional jobs would disappear, but that will largely be overcome by the huge number of job opportunities created due to the society becoming increasingly "digital"? All the new jobs should be in those big tech companies right? Well, people who thought they'd be ahead of everyone else and much better off because they hopped on the bandwagon, they are in for some harsh reality check. As Dave said, join the cue. As everyone else.

Worse if you are one of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion people. That jenga tower is crumbling fast.

I'm calling it now: Wait until Twitter becomes a hugely profitable success very quickly with very few employees, and then other bloated software tech companies see this and it dawns on them that they are doing it wrong.

[vk6zgo]

Yup. As I mentioned, this is a pretty common event. But it's apparently very bad because it is Musk. If it's one of the "approved" guys, then it's just normal business and bad luck.
When a company lays off thousands of employees, it is never pretty. The methods used are often just as ugly, if not worse.

As to employment, a thought. Haven't we been told that a lot of the more traditional jobs would disappear, but that will largely be overcome by the huge number of job opportunities created due to the society becoming increasingly "digital"? All the new jobs should be in those big tech companies right? Well, people who thought they'd be ahead of everyone else and much better off because they hopped on the bandwagon, they are in for some harsh reality check. As Dave said, join the cue. As everyone else.

Yeah, this has been the constant refrain in Oz since the 1980s.
Companies took it as a good excuse to stop training apprentices, so those few who were trained over the years since then are now mainly small business people who can pretty much name their own rates  to apply their expertise.
If your dunny is blocked, you can't find an "app" that will unblock it!

Meanwhile, many of those folk who went for degrees in "Computer Science", or "MBAs" have a whole new career flipping burgers.

[TimFox]

. Closing large debt can instantly reduce your credit score by a lot

This is absurd. There is no such nonsense in North America.

It was not a large change, but we always had a credit score extremely close to the perfect number.
Until, we paid off a normal car loan on schedule (perfect payment history), and then our score dropped immediately by a few dozen points.

[Bud]

Going by that logic, if you would Not paid off your loan in time, or in extreme case you did not pay it off at all, say because you became bankrupt,  your credit score would improve.

Right?

[TimFox]

Going by that logic, if you would Not paid off your loan in time, or in extreme case you did not pay it off at all, say because you became bankrupt,  your credit score would improve.

Right?

I did not think the change in my credit rating was logical.

[Black Phoenix]

Going by that logic, if you would Not paid off your loan in time, or in extreme case you did not pay it off at all, say because you became bankrupt,  your credit score would improve.

Right?

I did not think the change in my credit rating was logical.

In my understanding (I'm not an US citizen, but I'm sure that all banks around the world have a similar system for their customers but not as easy to access/know the value) a credit score system evaluates how good a customer is paying their outstanding loans.

So a good customer who pays his loans at time should have a higher credit score, having access to better financial terms, loan repayment window or even amount of credit to own, while a defaulting one should have a lower credit score, which in turn means he can't get a loan or good loan conditions having to some times rely in underground methods as dealing with loan sharks.

So for your credit score to have changed even by you paying the totally of the loan something else but had been at play.

[tom66]

I've come across this argument all the time with bosses.  "Why do we need such a large team to complete a project?"  "Because we're doing a lot of work."  I'm surprised to see engineers here repeating this bullshit...  engineering is complex, doing a lot of stuff at once requires a lot of engineers.  There is a reason Meta has as many engineers as they do... Yes, the Metaverse is complete bollocks, but even then it needs a lot of engineers to build something like that.

This is a list of the Twitter layoffs (and/or people who are looking to move on):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OoD3pVxFl718fnxs_cEaOIbcj-45-qNKZFnE1jQW86M/edit#gid=1799438631

A fair number of non-engineering roles going there.

Now I can't personally see what Twitter does beyond simple messaging, but I am sure there is a decent amount of backend, moderation, security, mobile apps, etc.  that requires a decent sized engineering staff (200-500 people?)  It's a lot harder to see where 7,500 go, but presumably many of those were not software, but rather the admin staff, Twitter is after all an ad agency.  In a general engineering company the ratio of admin to engineering seems to be about 1:3 or 1:4, but those companies have small sales departments in my experience (selling to few customers) whereas Twitter has huge ad sales.

[JohanH]

I'm calling it now: Wait until Twitter becomes a hugely profitable success very quickly with very few employees, and then other bloated software tech companies see this and it dawns on them that they are doing it wrong.

I think there is some philosophical aspect involved here. What is "wrong" here depends on who you ask. If it's about generating profit for shareholders, yes then it doesn't matter how you do it or with how many people or what they do (could as well trade bitcoins every one of them, sitting in Bahamas). But as with all "apps", services etc, in this case a social network, there is actually some idea behind it, that you provide something valuable to people that they find interesting and actually benefits them in some way (that's why they like to use it). So on one hand you provide something that is actually useful for something and benefits the society. On the other hand, in a society, when you employ people, you are actually responsible in some ways for the people that you employ. This part is more visible in Europe, due to all kinds of legalities and better workers' rights (for a European, it looks like they treat people like cattle in the US). Twitter might have continued without these drastic changes, maybe not with big profits, but still being a good employer and benefited a lot of people. Would it have worked or not? I don't know, maybe they would be forced to lay off people anyway in the end. But maybe not so drastically. I don't like the idea of these powerful rich people that only cares about their own profit and stupid ideas, instead of looking at improving the society as a whole, because in their position, they should have some responsibility.

[xrunner]

Now I can't personally see what Twitter does beyond simple messaging, but I am sure there is a decent amount of backend, moderation, security, mobile apps, etc.  that requires a decent sized engineering staff (200-500 people?)  It's a lot harder to see where 7,500 go, but presumably many of those were not software, but rather the admin staff, Twitter is after all an ad agency.  In a general engineering company the ratio of admin to engineering seems to be about 1:3 or 1:4, but those companies have small sales departments in my experience (selling to few customers) whereas Twitter has huge ad sales.

I'm no expert in large software projects, but I agree - is there a need for thousands of software engineers now at Twitter? Isn't it basically working "OK"? As you said, it's basically simple messaging like this forum. Does this forum need many software engineers behind it? No. It works for the most part.

Sure a forum like this one (SMF) put out updates, but I've used forums (like SMF) that were many years old versions and they were still working OK. Again, yes they had security issues and tweaks that should have been updated by the administrators, but they were runnning OK. I mean - how many serious bugs are there in the Twitter code that need a staff of 1000s of engineers to keep the old crippled thing going?

[SeanB]

Going to say the original investors in Twitter are glad it is sold, they made a huge profit after all the risk, along with all those shareholders who were bought out. As to what will happen to it, it likely will still run for a long while, after all the biggest income is advertising, and there are plenty of advertisers who hedge bets, paying ad spend to the big online advertisers, so the pool is spread between Twitter, Meta and Alphabet, and not likely to change too much. Will bet that the US taxman is the biggest loser, this year is likely to result in a massive negative tax bill, and then bringing it into the rest will allow them to "lose" any profit for a good number of years as well. When you have a 900 page index for tax.......

As to South Africa having servants, that is really only for the top 0.5%, as to be in the 1% is not difficult, with official unemployment sitting at 30%, and unofficial at around 60%. I have never had a servant since I was around 10, do my own housework, do my own washing, do a lot of the maintenance as well. With minimum wage being around $400 AUS per month (weird that Aus has wages either weekly or monthly, but bills are monthly from what I see online), and nearly half the population getting welfare (that is not good, seeing as the tax base is around 10% now, with many of the top having already left, often to Aus and NZ, or Canada) that is below the minimum wage, and just about at poverty level.

Musk left SA in 1988, which is basically when it was another country, and in no way is representative of SA today, he is more Canadian American than anything else.  You have more recent SA people in the USA, Charlise Theron (yes there are more than 44 people who speak Afrikaans, 35% of the mostly English city I live in), and, sorry for it, Die Antwoord. All different, all very different viewpoints.