Conventional wisdom suggests that if you work in a profit center, your job is much more safe during layoffs.
This did not hold true at Twitter, where, surprisingly, staff working on ads - which generated ~$5B/yr - we’re laid off like anyone else.
It is hurting the ads business:
Even though I am a tiny ad spender, I also noticed ads being glitchy.
As I talked with current software engineers at Twitter, they told me the eng team was fired, systems are transferred to a new team w little context & the eng taking it over just got a performance warning.
Twitter engineers just don't get a break from Elon.
Just in: at 3am Pacific Time (!!), a new email landed in their inbox. They're told another round of code reviews will happen tonight (Monday night). Engineers are told to prepare to show what they accomplished the last 10 days.
A current Twitter sw engineer tells me that all of this feels like it is coming out of the "sick system" of having people work for a toxic boss, forever (below).
The last, similar "code review" was later cited in the reasonings behind firing of devs.
I started angel investing in 2020. In 2021, a lot of people in tech were asking me about advice on how to do it.
My #1 advice was to not do it for the money plus expect you can lose your whole investment.
I just fully lost an investment I made ~10 months ago, company bankrupt.
The idea of both VC investing & angel investing is you bet on risky companies, many of which will not make it. As an angel you have a lot of disadvantages vs larger investors as well.
If you make a few investments, you likely will lose money. Why I say don’t do it for the money.
In my case, I made investments where I would be at peace if I lost all my money, and was hoping to get other things - learnings, supporting an idea I believed in, following along.
I got it from this investment as well. Also learned how acqui-hires are rare in todays market.
In what should not be surprising, across Europe, Twitter employees who are turning to employment lawyers will be ruled as not fired, even though Twitter - from the US - wanted to fire them. But it's not how it works here. You cannot let people go via one email.
Again, all of this is to be expected, and it's not like it's some major outage. It's the small type of outages or regressions we'll definitely keep seeing for a good while, while Twitter re-hires and re-onboards software engineers.
We'll most likely keep seeing regressions here and there for a while, especially with non-critical systems.
These outages will probably increase after the code freeze is lifted and new engineers - with less context on systems - start making changes.
Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their "code is not satisfactory" following the recent code review.
Dozens of other devs got performance warnings in their inboxes.
How much do Twitter devs have to take?
I confirmed the above details with current Twitter software engineers and managers. Line managers were unaware of the performance warnings sent out.
This "performance warning" is a PIP that can result in firing.
As a reminder, devs went through all this before in 3 weeks:
Week 1: 50% of their colleagues were fired - and some of these people as well.