Post by LFC on Oct 31, 2022 16:57:02 GMT
One of Musk's first moves is a massive f***-up. Bold mine.
Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.
The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.
Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”
The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.
Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”
He's bringing in outside Tesla employees who will be viewed as hatchet men and demanding that engineers work horrendous hours to meet his whims.
Even though he is barely three days into being “Chief Twit,” Musk has moved quickly to make changes at Twitter, first by changing its homepage for logged out users. With the help of Tesla engineers he has brought into Twitter as advisors, he’s also planning mass layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the code base. Those cuts are expected to begin this week with managers already creating lists of employees to cut. Employees tasked with executing projects of Musk’s since he took control Thursday evening have been working late into the night and over the weekend.
I work in IT and I know exactly the shit-storm this would cause in my company regardless of whether you were on this particular software development team or not. In one impulsive command he managed to make Twitter an unstable, unreliable employer in a region (which matters less today with WFH) and an industry that is brimming with excellent, available jobs. Talent and institutional memory will be walking out the door no matter how hard he backpedals, if he backpedals at all. If he doesn't, they don't meet his arbitrary deadline, and they get fired it will be a stampede across the IT organization. Good luck competing with the majority of your best developer's off in other companies, perhaps even competitors' companies.
On top of all that I suspect their golden handcuff is gone. With Twitter no longer being a public company their stock options will all have been purchased, at a big fat premium, by Musk & Co. That means that more senior people will be sitting on a fat stack of cash with no new potential big future payday to keep them around.
