Sorry to be talking about everyone's least favorite billionaire manchild again but this whole meltdown is so fascinating to me.
The gist of the most recent update seems to be: Musk already fired 50% of Twitter's workforce. He then put out some kind of ultimatum, whose specific phrasing I don't know but somehow incorporates the word "hardcore" into basically telling all remaining employees they have one of two options: prepare for a massive cultural shift into long hours on the grindset, or wuss out and take a 3-months severance package and leave.
Rumor has it that possibly as many as 75% are rejecting the "grindset" option. Which, if all of those people leave, would reduce Twitter to ~12% of its initial work force. Twitter office is literally locked down currently for fear of any retaliation from leaving employees.
And Musk has been so fundamentally stupid in all of this because his every move is like he's treating Twitter as a start-up (the printed code thing too, but I won't go into that again). See there absolutely is a certain breed of software engineer who'd chomp at a grindset offer. But those engineers are the fresh out of college, start-up chasers funneling all their time effort and sense of self-worth into the dream of grinding their start-up into millions of dollars of run-away success. Specifically on their own start-up company, or one whose vision has wooed them in with the possibility of unimaginable success.
And you can also find that kind of person in cutting-edge fields where the passion for the product would incentivize someone to accept the grind. I could genuinely see this being the case at SpaceX (hyper-competitive aerospace engineering field, opportunity to stamp your name on something historic) and perhaps even Tesla. In college at some career fairs, some of my friends talked to SpaceX and apparently one of the "perks" they were advertising was the literal chance to associate yourself with the SpaceX name.
And you know what Twitter is?
Sure there absolutely are (were) people at Twitter who love their job. But I'll bet anything the absolute vast majority loved it as a 9-to-5, which paid the bills and left open the remaining free time for family, hobbies, life-pursuits, sleep, living. Because at the end of the day Twitter is just a social media app. It's just a big bulletin board. What exciting work can you really do at Twitter? Polish some UI? Improve the app loading time? None of these people are sending anything to the moon. You think any of them would wanna work 80 hour weeks on this?
And even with the tech hiring sphere shrinking, there are still endless software jobs which will offer the same kind of thing as Twitter: "Come work on something kinda boring. It'll be worth it because we'll treat you well, pay you, and you get to go home to your life at the end of the day." I work that kind of job. It's nice! I can all but guarantee it's the kind of job Twitter employees want.
So now Musk, who's an idiot and a moron, who doesn't understand engineers and only has experience throwing his weight around at places like SpaceX where the employee body's own self-driven genius and dedication floated Musk into undeserved spotlight, is now trying to pull the same bullshit on people who just work on an app, and just wanna make end's meet, and maybe go bring their daughter to a dentist appointment. He's the embarrassing hype-man at a tepid concert, threatening to end the show if he doesn't start seeing headbanging and moshing while no one in the audience even quite wants to be there with him. He fundamentally doesn't (or refuses) to understand who he's working with and we're all just here watching him take a hammer to his ship's hull thinking all the employees would jump at the chance to patch the ship, and then acts confused when they all in fact jump ship. It won't work. It's going down with Musk inside it.
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