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Source: Heart of the Machine (ID: almosthuman2014)
The remaining 50% of Twitter employees: This is the closest I’ve come to losing my job.
According to reports, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he laid off a lot of staff. The original 7,500 employees have now been laid off by about half, and the entire Twitter original team has been almost completely destroyed.
Those most affected by Musk’s layoffs are Twitter’s product trust and security, policy, communications, tweet management, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social welfare, access control and many other important departments, and even Twitter. Special core engineering team.
Not only ordinary employees, but also management was “cleaned up” by Musk, affecting 90% of Twitter executives. In addition to CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO NegSegal, policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and legal counsel Sean Edgett, who fired immediately after the acquisition, this week he also fired Twitter’s VP of consumer product engineering, Arnaud Weber, and oversaw Twitter’s work with news publishers. More management staff including Tony Haiile, Senior Director of Product.
Some Twitter employees have already filed lawsuits against the company, claiming it violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act and California’s WARN Act, which requires companies to give at least 60 days’ notice of mass layoffs.
The fired employees will continue to receive pay and benefits until Twitter complies with U.S. federal law for mass layoffs, according to emails received by the fired employees. Musk promised that all laid-off employees would receive 3 months of base salary as severance pay.
The Verge reported that Musk agreed to pay severance pay to fired employees at least as much as Twitter offered before the deal closed, according to his merger agreement with Twitter and an internal employee FAQ in October. The FAQ states that prior to Musk’s acquisition, Twitter’s severance pay was two months’ base salary, or “target earnings” for sales employees in the incentive plan, “targeted” employee performance bonuses, health care Cash grants, and equity-equivalent cash “calculated within three months of the date of separation”.
On Thursday afternoon local time, Twitter employees received an internal letter instructing them not to come to the company the next day, and to return to work after the company made the decision to lay off employees.
On Friday, employees who survived the layoffs received an email sent to their work mailboxes. The following is the complete email, which is probably the closest they have come to losing their jobs:
Thank you for your patience during this transition and for your commitment to the important work Twitter does. We are sending this email to confirm that your employment has not been affected by today’s layoffs.
Over the past week, Elon has spoken with a number of employees, customers, partners, policymakers and Twitter users. He looks forward to communicating his vision for the company as soon as possible.
We know you may have a lot of questions, and we’ll be sharing more information next week. At the same time, please note that before Monday, “Bird’s Nest” is temporarily offline, our office building is temporarily closed, and the use of all documents is temporarily suspended. Offices will reopen on Monday, November 7.
Thank you for continuing to show respect for affected colleagues as we address these changes. As a reminder, we hope that you will continue to abide by company policy not to discuss confidential company information on social media, with the media, or elsewhere.
We look forward to working with you to create an exciting future for Twitter.
90% of machine learning team members are said to have been laid off
On the day Musk just bought Twitter, the Twitter headquarters was filled with a large number of Tesla, SpaceX engineers, and Twitter engineers went through the code line by line. It is said that Musk also asked Twitter’s engineers to print out their nearly 30 to 60 days old code for review, and another source said that Musk asked them to tear up the code and write it again on the computer.
This behavior received some ridicule, saying that he “doesn’t talk about martial arts”, and some people expressed support, saying that this was the implementation of the “Showmethecode” principle.
After so much tossing, in the end, he still started with the technical team.
Not long ago, Joan Deitchman, a former senior engineering manager at Twitter, revealed that her algorithm team had been disbanded.
“Yes, the team is gone. The team that studies and drives algorithmic transparency and algorithm choice. The team that studies algorithm amplification. The team that invents and builds ethical AI tools and methods. It’s all over.”
“Probably my last TwitterSlack message.”
A netizen who used to work at Twitter also posted that Twitter’s machine learning team has laid off 90% of its employees.
In all kinds of situations
In addition to layoffs, Twitter has seen a lot of other things since the acquisition.
Some employees said: As Musk is committed to slashing costs for Twitter in areas such as cloud hosting, Twitter is likely to have difficulty maintaining critical infrastructure in the short term.
There are also many advertisers exiting the Twitter platform, resulting in a significant drop in Twitter’s revenue.
In fact, far more than these corporate users have left the Twitter platform, but also many individual users, including some academic researchers.
European Space Agency astronomer Mark McCaughrean has been a regular Twitter user. For several years he has regularly shared his insights on space issues and his day-to-day life on Twitter. But he recently created an account on Mastodon, Twitter’s burgeoning rival, the blog-style social platform, and says he’s much more active on Mastodon than on Twitter.
Once such a more influential user gives up using Twitter, his original fans on Twitter may also be taken to another social platform, which eventually leads to a large loss of Twitter users.
About 877,000 accounts have been canceled since October 27, when Musk successfully acquired Twitter, and Nov. 1, according to data firm BotSentinel’s activity analysis of more than 3.1 million accounts. Perhaps in the past week, Twitter has lost more than 1 million users.
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