Twitter is in freefall.
Elon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of the office in San Francisco in the early afternoon, according to multiple news reports.
The billionaire said in a follow-up email, “If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person,” adding he would be at the company’s headquarters until midnight and would return Saturday morning, Reuters reported. The engineers should report at 2pm on Friday.
Meanwhile, Musk started a Twitter poll late on Friday asking followers to vote on whether to reinstate former US president Donald Trump’s account on the platform. Early results showed roughly 60% voting yes.
Musk’s emails came a day after reports indicated between 1,000 and 1,200 Twitter employees decided to quit the beleaguered social media company following a Thursday deadline from Musk that staffers sign up for “long hours at high intensity”, or leave. The New York Times also reported on the email and employee decisions.
I have been enjoying the comeuppance that has long been overdue, but here I depart with Musk’s approach. Employment does not and should never mean people being chained to their desks. A work/life balance is essential not only to mental and physical health, but to their quality of work. My industry – rail – has strictly regulated limits on hours of work for precisely this reason. An attitude such as Musk’s led to catastrophic mistakes and 35 deaths in a crash at Clapham. Okay, no one will die as a result of bad code at Twitter, but the principle still applies. Tired and stressed out people working long hours at high intensity make mistakes.
So, yeah, people are leaving. The very people he needs to stay on. If I worked at Twitter, my initial welcome of the takeover would be evaporating in exactly the same way and I would walk too.
I agree with your points on life/work balance – code produced under high pressure conditions tends to be full of bugs.
Even so, I can’t help wondering whether “long hours at high intensity” means something that you or I would find unacceptable, or just a normal 35-40 hour week.
I don’t generally use Twitter, so I probably wouldn’t notice, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t seem to be teeming with new features. What do all of its coders actually *do*?
One wonders. And you may be right. However, the language used raises red flags for me.
“long hours at high intensity” is how software is done. If you thing ‘coding’ is a 9–5 35-hour-week sort of job then you should be doing it.
I’ve spent about 30 years doing it.
I’m not a coder, but I’ve played with it enough to know that it is like other work that requires a high level of concentration. And with those other roles, such as the wiring work at Clapham in 1988, tired people make errors. Which was the point I was making here.
I didn’t realise they had coders at twitter. What have they been doing? From what I can see it hasn’t changed at all in all the time it has been going. So many characters per tweet and a list of contacts. IMO 95% of the staff are moderating Trumps tweets with the other 5% moderating everyone else they don’t like. I was surprised to find out how many worked there.
I would have thought there would be a need for patches and dealing with hostile attacks, but otherwise, yeah, most of it should be pretty automated.
I work in this industry and Musk is talking about coders not operational support staff who are the ones that deal with patches and attacks. He specifically talks about code commits which is where you release you next version of the software to others to review and approve.
To correct my error I’ll revise the % dealing with Trump to 93% and that more than covers the operational staff.
Locking out non-subscribers, possibly. It used to be easy to read even if you couldn’t post, but over the years it’s become an ever-greater pain in the arse.
That’s true. You can only see a tweet now, but if you scroll down, it stops you seeing what has been said.
If you click on the blue log in but then click on the x in the upper left corner without doing anything else you can scroll on. I just checked, the cheat still works.