Musk’s bloodbath in Silicon Valley

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Source/Chinese Business Strategy (ID: hstl8888)

55 engineers from Tesla entered Twitter at the behest of Musk and became the supervisors of Twitter engineers. They asked Twitter engineers to show the code they had written in the last few days, and explain step by step why they were designed this way?

After a series of storms, Twitter has turned upside down in just two weeks.

sleepless layoff night

“This is an unusually cold-blooded layoff that arguably has no precedent in the entire Silicon Valley.”

Wood, who has lived in the United States for more than a decade, from school to work, said.

Since Musk took over Twitter on October 27, rumors of layoffs have emerged in an endless stream. The initial version was to lay off 75% of the workforce. Wood said, “Colleagues are getting news through the media and Musk’s Twitter. No one knows the exact information, and no one talks to us.”

“Tormented”, Wood described his state in those days. If he were to lay off 75% of the staff, he guessed that he would be “inferior.”

On Friday of the second week, the layoffs were announced.

There are rumors in the company that the layoff list was actually finalized as early as last weekend. The reason why it has been delayed until now is that the company is looking for a team of lawyers to discuss how to minimize the compensation.

For Twitter employees, it’s a real Black Friday.

Since Thursday night, people have been receiving layoff notices one after another. “Almost no one slept, and everyone was refreshing the internal communication platform Slack and mailboxes over and over again,” Wood recalled.

If laid off, employees will receive an email in their personal mailbox; if they are not laid off, they will receive a retention email in their company mailbox.

The layoff emails are formatted in a uniform, rationale: “In order to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of cutting our global workforce, which we recognize will affect the many individuals who make valuable contributions to Twitter, but unfortunately Yes, this action is necessary to ensure the success of the company moving forward.”

For those who are on the layoff list, the company’s internal accounts will be locked one after another until the computer is completely locked.

“It’s a feeling of watching my comrades fall down one by one.” Wood’s department has more than 160 people. After this night, only less than 80 people remained.

On Slack, everyone took advantage of the last minute to swipe the screen with emoji “Salute”.

Wood’s mood is very complicated, depressed, angry, reluctant… But it is not enough to describe, until 2:00 in the morning, he received a retention email in the company mailbox.

“I didn’t feel relieved, and I didn’t feel happy, because now Twitter is completely different from when I joined.” Wood said.

Four years ago, Wood jumped to Twitter from another Silicon Valley company.

After two rounds of phone interviews and three or four offline interviews, it took a total of one month before Wood officially joined Twitter. He likes Twitter’s corporate culture and the way people communicate. For Wood, it’s a place to work efficiently and comfortably.

Since the outbreak of the new crown, Wood has been working from home, and at Twitter, most of the employees have adopted this form of office.

Although working from home, Wood also maintains an online working time of 8 to 10 hours a day. Maintaining a balance between life and work is the pursuit of most Twitter employees. Because of this, colleagues show the utmost respect for the lives of others when communicating.

Back then, it was shameful to send work messages to colleagues during non-working hours. Wood even specially wrote, “If you are inconvenient now, you can reply to me tomorrow.”

In just one week, this working environment has completely changed.

After Black Friday, less than half of Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees remained. The layoffs at the top level are even more tragic, only 1/3 are left, and only a few of the 1/3 have been re-entrusted with important responsibilities. Many executives have been directly demoted, and even become ordinary programmers.

“I’m going to insult you,” Wood said. Many people couldn’t accept this arrangement and simply chose to resign.

Those senior engineers are no better than executives.

Some reports mention that Musk had engineers print the code. This does exist, but it was quickly stopped, and there is no such thing as requiring dictation. But that doesn’t mean that extreme stress tests won’t come.

Fifty-five engineers from Tesla became supervisors of Twitter engineers, who had to explain to the former every line of code they had written over the past few decades.

This makes many engineers feel funny, “Tesla’s code and Twitter’s code are not the same thing at all, Twitter is more focused on distributed code, while Tesla is more focused on automotive system design, and the organizational language is not the same. Same.”

“It feels disgusting that way,” Wood said.

After layoffs, managers at the managerial level began to take on impossible tasks. Ideally, a manager would coordinate six or seven employees, but today, of the 80 people in Wood’s department, there are only four managers left. The company has new requirements for managers: manage 20 employees while spending 50% of their time writing code.

“Having a one-on-one meeting with each employee every week, a weekly planning meeting every week, and spending another 20 or even 30 hours writing code, in this way, 996’s work rhythm may not be able to accomplish such a huge amount of work. Workload.” Wood sighed.

life waterloo

Twitter’s crazy reform, the shock to its 7,500 employees, isn’t just work.

Only a few people can resign gracefully, and most people still have to bear huge life pressure. In this layoff, one of Wood’s colleagues lost his job, and his wife was laid off not long ago, but the mortgage still needs to be paid on time.

“My colleagues are crying, and those who have been laid off have not been laid off, and they don’t know where the next step will be.” Relatively speaking, Wood is lucky. He got a US green card two years ago, and the issue of work visa is not involved.

But many people in the same group of Chinese colleagues are facing an identity crisis. Before the layoffs, the company had 500 or 600 Chinese employees, but only more than 200 people remained after the layoffs. Most people need a job to continue their work visa in order to continue living in the United States.

Even for those who stayed, it became impossible for them to continue to apply for immigration through Twitter. Generally speaking, if the company lays off more than 5% of its employees, the USCIS will determine that there is a problem with the company and the immigration process will be suspended.

Wood has experienced the difficulty of obtaining a green card, which took five years before and after. This means that those who do not manage successfully will need to go through another set of twists and turns.

The identity problems faced by Indian colleagues are even more severe. Their green cards account for a lower proportion, and most of them face the problem of work visas.

If there is a problem with the work permit, he will become more passive when looking for a new job, and he is very likely to accept a job that is not well-matched in order to extend the work permit.

Many employees are collecting evidence, looking for lawyers, and going to fight Twitter.

The actual compensation given by the company is far from the previous promise, which is a compensation of two months’ basic salary, three months’ stock and this year’s year-end bonus. All in all, the difference may be five or six months of wages.

On Nov. 3, five employees sued Twitter, alleging that the company’s termination process for these employees, without providing 60 days’ written notice, violated federal and California WARN Acts, and failed to inform them of any severance compensation news.

It is said that they hired Lichten & Liss-Riordan, a well-known California labor rights law firm, whose partner Shannon Liss-Riordan had previously represented Tesla employees in the case of “illegal layoffs”. The case was eventually settled privately between the laid-off employees and Tesla, with Tesla paying an undisclosed amount.

On the weekend of the layoffs, Twitter employees speculated that Musk might move the Tesla layoffs to Twitter. In June of this year, Tesla laid off 10% of its employees on the grounds that their performance was not up to standard, and it was said that the compensation was only one week’s salary.

Wood, who stayed, expected that his salary might be greatly reduced. In Twitter’s salary structure, stocks account for the majority, and after Twitter’s delisting, stocks are only guaranteed for one year.

Wood also has a deeper concern. Salary is of course part of the job, but most employees join a company and there must be other pursuits. When everything is different, what’s the point of staying?

Silicon Valley enters the cold winter

The Twitter boom of yesteryear is long gone.

On Twitter, Musk explained the reasons for the big layoffs: “Regarding the layoffs at Twitter, unfortunately, when the company is losing more than $4 million a day, there is no choice.”

Since the beginning of this year, some departments of Twitter have carried out a reform of performance appraisal. If the performance appraisal is not completed, employees will also be laid off.

According to Twitter’s 2021 financial report, Twitter’s full-year revenue was $5.08 billion, a year-on-year increase of 37%, but it recorded a net loss of $221 million. The first-quarter results of this year also missed expectations, with revenue of $1.2 billion in the quarter, down 23% from the previous quarter. There have also been reports of exaggerating the number of users.

It’s not just Twitter, but tech giants across Silicon Valley.

Google reported a sharp drop in profits; social media companies such as Meta said ad sales, the core of their business, had cooled rapidly; and Microsoft, long considered a benchmark in the tech industry, also expects the slowdown to continue at least through the end of the year.

Tech companies have led the U.S. economy over the past decade and boosted the stock market during bad days in the coronavirus pandemic. But last year’s “release of water” by the Federal Reserve brought “return to the light”, but it also planted evil causes.

Today, the economy is self-inflicted: Inflation and rising interest rates have become difficult problems to face. Tough times are coming for the Silicon Valley giants, too.

Amazon is also reining in the expansion of its warehouse operations, mothballing buildings, exiting leases and delaying plans to open new facilities. The company hired 1.52 million people in the second quarter, nearly 100,000 fewer than at the end of March.

Affected by the decline in consumer demand for non-rigid product updates and iterations, Apple’s life is not easy. In fiscal 2022, the sales of iPhone, iPad, MacBook and wearable devices were all lower than expected, and iPad even showed a negative growth of 8.7% year-on-year.

Google-owned YouTube, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, social media platforms that are losing their active users, Meta announced in late October that profits in the most recent quarter were down more than 50% from a year ago.

▲Meta third quarterly report ▲Meta third quarterly report

Generally speaking, compared with the C-end market, which is more affected by the economic cycle, the B-end business is always relatively stable.

Microsoft has shrugged off a slump in computer sales with the explosive growth of its cloud-computing product Azure. But the business has started to weaken as cloud computing customers seek to reduce spending.

The Silicon Valley giants, who are unable to escape the market decline, have fallen into the predicament of losing their teeth one after another.

“A new financial crisis is coming, and the winter of Silicon Valley is coming.” Wood believes.

After Musk’s bloodbath on Twitter, Wood has not been to the company, nor has any management approached him to talk. “There was no human interaction throughout,” Wood concluded.

When Musk first took over Twitter, he visited the company once. For this reason, the company sent an email to employees, expressing that interested employees can go and “say Hi” to him. But Wood didn’t go, because “I have no interest in saying Hi to him.” Wood used to think that Musk had done some things and was a capable person, but now he only thinks that he is a joke in Silicon Valley.

He has heard that the company will eliminate telecommuting altogether in the future. During this period, many colleagues took the initiative to go to the company. “Maybe they feel that they need to feel more at ease in the company.”

But Wood felt that there was no need for this, and he still did what he had to do. It’s just that most employees are in a state of disarray now and don’t know what to do. He heard that some departments wanted to hire back the laid-off employees because they had no jobs. “It’s kind of ironic,” he said.

Twitter has completely changed, Wood found. People are actually producing less work, but more hours online.

“It used to be shameful for colleagues to talk about work during off hours, but now if you’re not there at 10pm and don’t reply to work messages, it’s considered irresponsible.”

This led him to new concerns that the company might go from pursuing work-life balance to being forced to embrace 996s and 007s.

Today, colleagues no longer dare to talk about the company through internal communication software. They once had an engineer colleague named Manu Robert who made a browser extension to help others leave performance reviews and testimonials of key achievements.

Manu posted the extension link to Slack, and within three hours he was fired for “violating the rules.”

Wood and some colleagues speculate that Musk has a dedicated staff responsible for collecting his own remarks on the workplace social platform Blind, LinkedIn, and even Twitter, which makes some colleagues silently hide their truth on these sites. information.

If in April of this year, when Musk first announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter, there were still people who had expectations for him, maybe not now. “At that time, about 1/4 people in the company were more optimistic about him, 1/4 people hated him, and the remaining half remained neutral. “

Wood felt that the company’s status quo was running counter to his original expectations. Although he stayed, he didn’t know what would happen in the future, “like accepting another lingering”.

He updated his resume on the job search website, but found that almost no company took the initiative to say hello.

This is a stark difference from the employment environment of the previous two years. At that point, if Wood updated his resume, a lot of companies would start a conversation right away. But now, even those small companies that have never heard of it will receive hundreds of resumes as soon as they release their positions.

This year, many big companies in Silicon Valley have issued news of layoffs or cessation of recruitment. Tesla cut about 200 jobs at the end of June, Lyft, the second-largest U.S. travel giant, laid off 13% of its workforce, Amazon cut hiring in some departments, Microsoft plans to cut 1% of its 180,000 employees, and Google announced that it wants to make the company more efficient 20%, with both layoffs and slow hiring.

A large number of unemployed people have flowed into the talent market, but the demand for recruitment is shrinking and slowing down, and the employment environment in Silicon Valley is not the same as it used to be.

Even more worrying for job seekers is that the “Silicon Valley culture” they used to be proud of may disappear.

In the past, Wood and his colleagues often felt that Twitter was a first-tier company in Silicon Valley, and working here gave them a sense of accomplishment and a more halo of professional resumes. In the United States, the laws are relatively loose, and most entrepreneurs and capitalists will respect technicians and give them good treatment, and engineers will be more enthusiastic about their work.

This is exactly why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley.

But now, Musk’s frenzied layoffs feel like a violent attempt to break with everything in the past.

Wood sometimes hopes that Musk can bring back the messy tweets so that his professional resume will be more convincing. But most of the time, he is still afraid that once this “violent layoff attempt” succeeds and big Silicon Valley companies follow suit, the entire Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley culture will be completely destroyed.

For now, Wood’s concerns are most likely becoming a reality. Twitter’s layoff storm has not subsided. On November 9, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, announced that the company is making the most difficult changes in its history, laying off 13% of the company’s workforce, and more than 11,000 people will be And resign.

Will Silicon Valley still be that Silicon Valley?

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