Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them
- Reference: 1677542168
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/02/27/twitter_latest_layoffs/
- Source link:
The biz has undergone dramatic changes since it was acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion. Shortly after the billionaire took over as CEO, Twitter's 7,500 staff was in November slashed by more than 50 per cent. Entire teams across multiple departments were let go, including hose tackling machine-learning ethics, content moderation, communications, and more.
Musk's controversial behavior and antics have turned advertisers off; half of the company's top 100 advertisers, who collectively spent over $750 million in ads last year, have pulled out of Twitter, [1]according to a report by the non-profit organization Media Matters for America. Meanwhile, the business launched a subscription service costing from $8 a month, enticing users with a blue verified check mark on their account, more visibility on people's timelines, fewer ads, and some other special features.
[2]
Twitter has hardly been profitable, and is now saddled with incredible debt and interest payments after that forty-four billion dollar takeover; Musk will have a hard time turning the company around as advertising, its largest source of revenue, continues to dwindle. This latest round of job cuts has reduced its workforce to about 2,000 staff, [3]according to the New York Times.
[4]Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions
[5]San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave
[6]Twitter stiffed us on $2m bill, claim consultants in lawsuit
[7]How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?
Some workers apparently realized it was game over for them when they were logged out of work email accounts, laptops, and other applications over the weekend. Earlier in the week, the business's Slack and Jira instances were [8]switched off , according to The Verge. It's said Twitter hadn't paid its Slack bill, though rather being cut off by the Salesforce-owned service, the workspace was manually deactivated by someone at Twitter perhaps to see how well teams worked without the chat tool.
Even the monetization infrastructure team overseeing Twitter's revenue streams was hit by the job cuts, going from 30 people down to eight.
[9]
Rumors of the latest layoffs began when it was [10]reported Twitter product manager Esther Crawford, who was leading the Blue subscription service and upcoming payments platform, had been laid off or otherwise exited the business. She was famous for [11]tweeting a photo of herself kipping on the floor at Twitter HQ in San Francisco to meet Musk's demanding deadlines.
A class-action lawsuit was filed against the Tesla tycoon, who was [12]accused of breaking America's employment laws by laying off employees without having given them sufficient notice. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-has-driven-away-half-twitters-top-100-advertisers
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y-2KfBv@MGhAFEComRWqEAAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/technology/twitter-layoffs.html
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/twitter_musk_week/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/09/sf_investigating_hotel_twitter_musk/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/23/twitter_consultant_lawsuit/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/06/twitter_opinon_column/
[8] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613288/twitter-slack-jira-outages-performance-degradation
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y-2KfBv@MGhAFEComRWqEAAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/26/23615841/twitter-blue-esther-crawford-layoffs
[11] https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/1587709705488830464?s=20
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/twitter_warn_act_lawsuit/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Famous for a photo of herself kipping on the floor ::snip for brevity::
Just for the record, sleeping in the office is a long-standing tradition in Silly Con Valley.
Admittedly, it's usually only during the final push on shipping a new or vastly improved product ... or when attempting to meet sales projections for a quarter-end's last second hocky-stick sales profile (sales weasels are notorious for this).
It just got worse (again)
Scott "Dilbert" Adams finally came out proper (via a major rant) as a man with questionable opinions and the Dilbert cartoon thus got removed from pretty much every publication.
It was thus inevitable that Musk started defending him.
I'm guessing there were still some advertisers left that hadn't gone yet, that had to be fixed..
Re: It just got worse (again)
I guess the whack-jobs gotta support the bat-shit crazy in a kind of twisted variation on a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenario.
Re: It just got worse (again)
Not only that, but it's now come out that Twitter's blue verify check has mostly benefited Putin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/22/russian-propagandists-said-buy-twitter-blue-check-verifications/
But then, Musk is a white South African who's family benefitted greatly from apartheid, which makes his Scott Adams support expected.
Surely it can't be long until it finally stops floating around the bowl and sinks to the bottom....
Maybe this is part of a personal Tax write down excercise for Musk.
He's concerned that Telsa 's losses aren't enough to match PayPals resulting a profit sometime soon, so needs a large loss maker to make sure he doesn't accidently contribute any tax.
That’s as good an explanation as any other I’ve seen.
Matter of time
It's just a matter of time until people find enough rocks to attach to the bird's legs so it can't fly anymore.
Sleeping at work is old hat
Many years ago we had a mattress stashed in a large electrical riser at work.
Entrance by key only, many a hang-over was managed there.
Some may have started there too.
Anyone else smell a tax dodge?
Considering Musks overt (one could say intentional) display of mismanagement, there has to be an additional reason for his behaviour with Twitter other than calamitous incompetence.
Famous for a photo of herself kipping on the floor at Twitter HQ to meet Musk's demanding deadlines
Sleeping on the job? What sort of selfish lack of commitment is this when you feel that you can spend time in the office not actually working but indulging in such self indulgent behaviour? And daring to show the world how lazy you are! This is sending precisely the wrong sort of message about what's expected, good riddance to all these people who can't produce high volumes of quality work when they've been awake for 3 days!
Frankly, it's code til you drop time now, and once you're all used up there'll be more willing suckers willing to be used up next. And if you're still here after a week we'll know you've been slacking because nobody working hard enough can last that long!