In an interesting turn of events, hundreds of Twitter employees have reportedly resigned from their roles at the company, citing Elon Musk’s “hardcore working environment” as unbearable.
To say things have not been smooth for the microblogging platform since Elon Musk took over might be an understatement at the moment.
Musk immediately made some changes to the organisational structure and management of the company as soon as he took over. He immediately fired key executive officials, including CEO Parag Agrawal, the CFO Ned Segal, the Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, and the General Counsel Sean Edgett.
But that didn’t stop there. Since then, the ‘Chief Twit’ has fired a couple of employees in what he termed as creating a healthy path for the company to achieve the required success.
This was closely followed by a mass layoff, which slashed the company’s 7,500 employees by half.
Following that action, The company’s employees claimed in a class action lawsuit that the firm engaging in mass layoffs violated federal and California law by failing to give the requisite 60 days’ notice.
The lawsuit also requested a court order barring the company from asking fired employees to sign paperwork without first alerting them that the case was still pending.
But now, some remaining employees are leaving the company independently instead of working in the working environment Elon Musk desires.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk sent employees an email about his vision of “Twitter 2.0” and how it’d require “long hours,” for it would be “high intensity” and “extremely hardcore.” The executive further asked employees to sign an online form by 5 PM ET on Thursday committing to the same. The condition was if employees refused to sign the form, they’d receive three months of severance pay.
How did Twitter get here
Numerous workers have announced that they had rejected Musk’s offer after the deadline passed by posting goodbye messages and salute emojis on Slack. Additionally, staff began tweeting about their employment at the organization ending, even on the social networking platform.
The social media giant had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, thanks to Musk unceremoniously laying off about half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed.
Also, in a surprising move, the company has temporarily closed all office buildings and suspended employee access. Since several staff members have opted to go, the business sent an email announcing that it will close its offices and prevent staff badge access until Monday.
Given the scale of the resignations this week, remaining and departing employees are saying they expect Twitter to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.
Surprisingly, a hashtag for the platform’s death, #GoodByeTwitter, is currently trending on the platform. Individuals have begun expressing their fears, some concerns and others ridiculing the CEO, who they believe is slowly taking the company to its death.
Musk, meanwhile, is appalled by the trend. He thinks it’s absurd that people would visit the social networking site to trend its passing and increase its notoriety.
According to additional workers who wanted anonymity to talk without Musk’s permission, some “important” teams at the company have now either totally or almost completely resigned. This comprises the front-end and traffic teams, who direct engineering requests to the appropriate backend services, according to Verge.
Every engineer at the company uses the core system libraries that are maintained by the same team that left. Without this team, you cannot run Twitter, a departing worker remarked.
Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers on call 24/7 and acting as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures.
“If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.
In a tweet Thursday evening, Musk said: “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”
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