“At 9 a.m. PT on Friday, November 4, everyone will receive an email with the subject line: your role at Twitter. (…) If your job is not impacted, you will receive a notification on your Twitter address. Otherwise on your personal address. » The approximately 7,000 employees of the social network acquired by Elon Musk received this email on Thursday, November 3, just hours before the company launched a vast layoff process. The method illustrates the expeditious, even brutal style of the unstoppable entrepreneur boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who acquired the company a week earlier.
“To ensure the safety of employees, as well as IT systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all access badges suspended. If you are in an office or on your way there, please go home,” details the management, which justifies the use of dismissal by email by the large number of employees working from home. Employees are also intimidated not to communicate outside with the media or on social networks.
The exact extent of the “charrette” of forced departures was not yet known overnight from Thursday to Friday. Over the past few weeks, employees have seen many contradictory but all impressive predictions in the press: 75% of all employees, then 25%. Thursday, the Bloomberg agency provided that half of the workforce would be thanked. the wall street journalhe evoked a range of 2,000 to 3,700.
” A joke “
Admittedly, layoffs in the United States can be immediate, and Twitter’s workforce increased from 5,500 to 7,500 employees between the end of 2020 and the end of 2021, despite the lack of results, chronic since the creation of the company. Some employees of this former Silicon Valley start-up also recall being much better off than many workers in other sectors. Nevertheless, the Musk method shakes and shocks some.
“The ongoing dismissal process is a farce and a disgrace. Tesla henchmen make decisions about people they know nothing about except the number of lines of code produced. It’s completely absurd.”, Tweeted on Sunday, Taylor Leese, the director of a team of engineers dismissed. Mr. Leese refers to the keep-or-fire lists drawn up by the new management and mentioned in several press articles. “There are ten people who manage for one who codes”, Mr. Musk had complained in October on Twitter, seeming to want to place computer engineers at the center of the future organization.
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