As if Elon Musk’s recent staff purge at Twitter wasn’t enough, many more employees are leaving the company following a hardcore demands letter from the new CEO. This latest departure of employees leaves many departments in the company without staff and is leaving people wondering how the company can recover. There’s also so many Tweeters moving to Mastodon.
Just two weeks ago, Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, purged the company by laying off 7500 employees, including a couple of critical engineers. However, things didn’t stop there as the layoffs continued, with Musk kicking out anyone who dared criticize his new hardcore cultural reset. After these big layoffs, the company only had about 2900 employees remaining.
Following the latest layoffs, Musk sent a form to all remaining employees with a deadline of 5 pm Wednesday. In this form, employees had to indicate if they’ll be staying on and following the new cultural reset, including the hardcore expectations of longer working hours at a higher intensity. Anyone who did not accept these terms would be laid off immediately and receive their severance packages.
Was this ultimatum the straw that broke the camel’s back? Quite possibly, as soon as this ultimatum was set, hundreds of employees flooded Twitter’s slack with farewell messages and emojis.
Both remaining and resigning employees at Twitter opened up to The Verge and stated that they’re certain that the platform will start breaking down soon following the sheer amount of departures. Multiple critical teams inside Twitter have either completely resigned or almost completely resigned.
These include the traffic and front-end teams that are vital for routing engineering requests to the correct back-end services. The team responsible for maintaining the platform’s core system libraries is also gone – and this team is vital for running the platform.
Other teams that have been severely gutted include the Command Center, which are the engineers available 24/7 to handle any internal problems, as well as the team that manages the Twitter API for businesses. Twitter has already reached out to other engineering staffers to fill critical roles, but is it too little, too late?
Musk Tweeted on Thursday, saying that the best people were staying and he wasn’t worried. However, it does make you wonder how the few remaining members will cope with managing all these different roles and teams that have left. He wasn’t joking when he said staff would have to put in longer hours at higher intensities, as now there’ll be no other option. Is this all part of Musk’s plan?
Amidst all this staffing chaos is also a lawsuit that has been filed against Twitter. This lawsuit is from an ex-Twitter employee, Dmitry Borodaenko, a disabled employee who was fired for not returning to the office after Musk’s hardcore demands that required employees to work higher hours at the office. Having a disability meant that Mr. Borodaenko worked remotely. In his claim, Mr. Borodaenko says that Musk’s call for all employees to return to the office or quit goes against the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
Is this the start of the end for Twitter and the start of an era for Mastodon? Or will Musk’s extreme management style actually reap the rewards in the future? For now, things at Twitter are very uncertain, but we’ll keep an eye out to see how things progress.
