Hey Twits, Welcome To Tech!

There's been quite a bit of comment over Elon Musk laying off what's been estimated as half of Twitter's workforce. A typical version, from a Twitter internal e-mail, goes like this:

"By 9 am PST on Friday, November 4, everyone will receive an individual e-mail with the subject line: Your Role at Twitter. (...) If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter e-mail. If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal e-mail." The 7,000 or so employees of the social media platform bought by Elon Musk received this e-mail on Thursday, November 3, just a few hours before the company launched a vast layoff process. The method illustrates the expeditious, even brutal style of the unstoppable entrepreneur and boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who acquired the company a week earlier.

Offhand, I've never tried to tally up the number of times I was laid off, or in some cases fired, over my tech career, at least half a dozen, and that's not counting the times I got a new job before it could happen when I saw the handwriting on the wall. The Twitter e-mail is more or less standard practice, although another version, which I've also been through, is to have a pair of managers summon each employee into a little room where another pair tells them, "There won't be a place for you at the dynamic new WampusCorp," at which time security escorts the deselectee out the door. They're given a time after hours when they can return to retrieve their personal effects.

Actually, I always had a good idea when this was going to happen, and in the days prior I'd already removed my stuff. As far as I was concerned, cleaning out my desk was their job, not mine. The takeaway here is that this sort of thing is routine, and beyond that, as the Dilbert strip recognizes, the bosses don't actually know who's doing a good job, but if they have an inkling, they fear and distrust those people and get rid of them whenever they can.

So what intrigues me most is that the Twits feel so disappointed.

Twitter employees "began posting on the platform Thursday night and Friday morning that they had already been locked out of their company email accounts ahead of the planned layoff notification," CNN reported on Friday.

Musk "purged roughly half of Twitter's 7,500 employee base, leaving whole teams totally or near completely gutted," the Verge similarly reported on Friday.

Employee messages on social media expressed regret and wistfulness at the news of having been dismissed.

, , , A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Musk and Twitter, meanwhile, with a suit in California court claiming that Twitter did not give its fired employees sufficient notice before their termination.

So maybe two years from now, they're each gonna get a check for a few hundred bucks? My experience of tech has been that every IT department and every tech vendor is massively overstaffed, and the most effective skill people have is the ability not to be around when work gets handed out. In Silicon Valley, these people are also wildly overpaid, and as well they get free popcorn and free beer on Fridays with a no-questions-asked ride home from security if they overindulge. How smart can these people be if they think this will last forever?

The other question is how smart can Elon Musk be if he got himself into this mess? I read that prior to Friday's layoffs, Twitter managers had been told to draw up lists of employees to cut, and if they didn't, they'd be fired themselves. But I'd already decided that if Musk dated Amber Heard, much less if he froze embryos with her as alleged, he can't be that bright -- even the pointy-haired boss in the Dilbert strip knows they don't know who their good workers are, but if they did, they'd lay those off specifically as a passive-aggressive strategy to show Musk the disaster he's brought on himself.

So fire everyone and start over as a business approach works no better than any other. I see reports that Musk has sent teams from Tesla and SpaceX to oversee the transition, but this assumes these organizations are more effective than the people who were laid off at Twitter -- a big assumption. They'll certainly tell you they are, and once they're installed, they'll certainly give their old colleagues preferential treatment, but I doubt if that will improve anything.

Actually, I spent part of my career at a tech company that was well known at the time, a competitor to IBM, that bought up underperforming tech companies under the assumption that they'd make them profitable -- not all that different from Elon's strategy when you think about it. The problem was that it was a Ponzi scheme not that far from Enron, and its CEO spent 12 years in prison for securities fraud.

They took layoffs to a new level. As I noted, their strategy was to acquire other tech companies, but given the nature of tech, people who leave one company inevitably get jobs in another tech company. This company's technique was, once they took over a new company, the HR department would search the newly acquired company's personnel records to locate people who'd once worked for them. Then there'd be a day when not only the inessential people would be laid off (i.e. called into the little room and told there was no longer a place for them), but former employees who'd moved on and gotten a job at the new company would be fired as well.

In hindsight, that was to eliminate anyone who potentially knew too much. But hey, that's tech. I survived, for whatever that's worth.