

Whether the project is actually urgent, or simply a useful way to encourage those unwilling to work all hours and weekends for a capricious new manager to quit voluntarily, is unclear.
#Whole milk vs skim fit 4chan code
Even those who pass the code reviews may find their jobs under threat: one project, to overhaul the company’s Twitter Blue subscription service and bring in a monthly fee for verification, was instituted with a deadline of just one week. Although the chief twit has denied that he was explicitly trying to get rid of staff before an expensive round of cash bonuses became due on 1 November, the time pressure is there nonetheless. They can’t be much more complex than that, because Musk’s goal is to see off a quarter of the company’s staff – and to do it quickly.

In practice, the code reviews appear to be little more than a blunt ranking of quantity, like assessing a construction crew by how many bricks they have laid. But the code reviews went ahead, albeit digitally, and on Monday, the layoffs of the rank and file began. Shortly after, a second missive went out, telling people to shred those printouts. On the first day, a missive went out commanding coders (software engineers) to print out their last 30 days of work and bring it to a code review, where one of the Tesla engineers would assess their skill. Others note that the fact that the executives fought so hard to force Musk to complete the purchase suggests that they did their job very well indeed, securing a multibillion payout for shareholders that would have evaporated if they had let him walk away.īut again, the message is sent: no one is safe. According to a Financial Times report, his argument is that were it not for his bid, the value of the company’s stock would have collapsed. The payouts will almost certainly arrive eventually, after Musk plays a mini version of the same courtroom drama that led to him being forced to buy the company in the first place. Despite early reports suggesting the executives were in line for multimillion-dollar golden parachutes, Musk appears instead to have decided that he hasn’t seen enough of courtrooms in the past six months, firing them “for cause” – that is, alleging gross incompetence – and denying them their payouts.

Musk fired Twitter’s chief executive and chief finance officer, as well as the head of legal and policy, Vijaya Gadde – the most powerful woman at Twitter and the person most identified with the decision to ban Donald Trump from the site. Backed up by a brains trust of close friends, including the venture capitalists Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan, PayPal co-founder David Sacks, and Alex Spiro, his personal lawyer, as well as a handpicked cohort of Tesla engineers, he has set about reshaping the company.Īlongside the symbolic change to the homepage came the actual changes to the executive team. In the days since, Musk has torn through the social network’s headquarters like a hurricane. The message, for those inside Twitter and out, was clear: meet the new boss, not at all the same as the old boss. No focus groups, no A/B tests, no memos passed back and forth between senior executives arguing the pros and cons of each option. No, the point of the change isn’t what happened, but when it happened: immediately. Twitter has flipped and flopped on the question multiple times in the past, sometimes arguing that its goal as a company is simply to maximise the number of people reading tweets, other times arguing that it should be maximising account-holders, and other times focusing on “monetisable” users – those who see adverts. That change of focus isn’t unprecedented. It’s a change of focus, in other words, from encouraging users to sign up or log in, to embracing visitors who just want to see what’s happening and then bail. If you visit without being logged into an account, you will no longer be sent to a log-in page instead, you’ll be taken to the Explore tab, the site’s algorithmically curated selection of the best tweets and most popular trends. One of his first acts was to order a change in the site’s homepage. In the week since he marched through the company’s San Francisco office holding a basin – so that he could tweet “let that sink in” – and dubbed himself first “chief twit” and then “Twitter complaint hotline operator” (his actual title, according to internal systems, is boring old “chief executive officer”), the world’s richest man has done the corporate-takeover equivalent of flipping the table halfway through a game of chess.Įxternally, the changes are slim, but significant. That’s nothing new, but the day-to-day awfulness has been ramped up by Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition. Twitter isn’t a good place to be right now.
