Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

“Alexa, change the president.”

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

You cannot shame the shameless.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

This really is a full service blog.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Yet Another Musk Post

Yet Another Musk Post

by | 123 Comments

This post is in: 

If you want the latest updates on Twitter layoffs, as well as Elon’s whining and crying about losing advertisers, the Guardian has a pretty good live blog going. Marcy Wheeler also has a good piece with more analysis of the epically bad deal Elon made to buy Twitter.

I want to focus on those who will be hurt by the layoffs. The NYT has a new tech podcast called “Hard Fork” that interviewed two Twitter employees (anonymously, with AI voice replacement to shield their identities). These two employees were US citizens and engineers, so they’re well-paid and probably going to be fine if they’re laid off. But, as one of them pointed out, some Twitter employees, H-1B visa holders, will not.

H-1B visas are handed out to employees who have specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or equivalent. They’re a pain in the ass to get and administer, so they’re generally used by large tech companies with big HR departments to recruit engineers who they can pay less than a US citizen, and who they can order around because the alternative these visa holders face is deportation. These employees/indentured servants make it hard for tech workers to unionize, though I grant that many techbro programmers read too much Ayn Rand and wouldn’t be good targets for a union. Still, as the invisible hand, aided by their hero Elon, slaps them around, at least a few of them might get a clue. Their H-1B counterparts don’t have the luxury of viewing themselves as nascent Howard Roarks or Dagny Taggarts — they just have to endure whatever torture Elon dreams up.

The stories of Twitter employees working 87 hour weeks and sleeping on the floor no doubt include a bunch of H-1B holders who are from places like India or former Soviet republics. These people have few choices but to work like dogs, and few opportunities if they’re laid off today. That’s the kind of gross cruelty that Elon will visit upon those he considers his inferiors as he runs Twitter into the ground.

Reader Interactions

123Comments

  1. 1.

    Dangerman

    I heard yesterday that Jack Dorsey (Twitter Founder) is behind some new Social Media venture: Blue Sky. You can volunteer for beta testing now.

    May Twitter be spoken in the same way as MySpace is now.

    https://bsky.app

  3. 3.

    Fair Economist

    A live Guardian blog on the Twitter implosion! And it’s apropos! LOL.

    It’s bad already for Twitter, and in a week they’ll have bluechecked identity thieves (at the LOW LOW price of only $8 per month!) plus the liberals will mostly exit after the election. It’ll get a lot worse.

  5. 5.

    Tony G

    Maybe Elon will succeed in his plan to make Twitter the next Stormfront. (A white guy who grew up wealthy under apartheid in South Africa turning out to be a far-right activist? I never saw that coming!)

  6. 6.

    Mousebumples

    I’m staying on Twitter through the Midterms, and then I’ll be reevaluating my options.

    I’d miss the sports communities I’m a part of there – even if I follow political, nerdy, and minority Tweeps elsewhere.

    Anyone have thoughts on the theory that Musk is blowing up Twitter on purpose, since it’s a great place to organize and find like minded people (*and trolls)? If it’s a Dem/Ukrainian/etc. strength, it makes sense to sabotage…?

  7. 7.

    Brachiator

    The stories of Twitter employees working 87 hour weeks and sleeping on the floor no doubt include a bunch of H-1B holders who are from places like India or former Soviet republics. These people have few choices but to work like dogs, and few opportunities if they’re laid off today. That’s the kind of gross cruelty that Elon will visit upon those he considers his inferiors as he runs Twitter into the ground.

    I don’t know. Sounds like Musk is doing them a favor by firing them.

  8. 8.

    Another Scott

    “We’ve drawn intense public scrutiny by acting like the biggest assholes on God’s green earth for eight days, and we’re all out of ideas.” t.co/MZLBGkVYFS

    — southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 4, 2022

    [ womp, womp ]

    It’s unfortunate for the good people at Twitter, and the good users who have large followings, but there’s been months of indications that he was going to wreck the place.

    March 14 – quietly bought 9.2% of the company
    April 4 – FEC filing indicating that he’s the largest shareholder
    April 14 – announces hostile takeover bid
    etc.

    Change is scary, but life is change.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  9. 9.

    Eunicecycle

    I saw Elon might have already run afoul of California labor laws. A massive layoff like this requires a 60 day notification to the state. If there are any loopholes I’m sure Elon found them.

  10. 10.

    geg6

    @Dangerman:

    I heard Musk is somehow involved with that, too.  Don’t know if it’s true, but I have no trust in Dorsey, which why I never adopted Twitter.

  11. 11.

    Sister Golden Bear

    Twitter is also getting hit with class action lawsuit for violating the WARN Act by not giving 60 days notice of a mass layoffs. (In practice, having been through it myself, companies kick people out of the office ASAP but still have to pay those laid off for another two months.)

    While Muskrat has thumbed his nose at laws in CA previously (opening the manufacturing plant against Covid restrictions) I doubt state/fed regulators will rollover as easier. Plus the horrific way the layoffs are being done aren’t gonna win fans on the jury if it goes to trial.

    Not sure how much this benefits H1-B folks other than arguably they can claim they’re entitled to an extra two months while they try to find another job that will sponsor them.

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    @Mousebumples: He’s apparently got backers from KSA and other authoritarian regimes.  One could speculate that they want access to backdoors to spy on dissidents and the like, and driving away good sensible people means that there would be less pushback when it comes out that that’s happening?

    “Oh Bonesaw’s spying on human rights activists on Twitter?  Meh, who cares.  Only bad people are still there after Musk took over…”

    Dunno.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  14. 14.

    Brachiator

    @Eunicecycle:

    Musk is often too lazy to check the basics, let alone find loopholes. And so, according to reports…

    Twitter is being sued for not giving employees advanced written notice of a mass layoff, in violation of worker protection laws including the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act as well as the California WARN Act, both of which require 60 days of advance notice. Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the company began mass layoffs early on Friday in an effort to reduce costs by eliminating 3,700 jobs, or 50% of its total workforce.

    The fun is just starting.

  16. 16.

    VOR

    Apparently advertisers started leaving months ago when Musk announced his bid. There was a revival when it looked like the bid was going to fail. But now auto makers like GM, Ford, and VW are pondering whether they want to advertise on a platform owned by the CEO of a competitor. Gosh, who could have seen that coming?

  17. 17.

    Anoniminous

    Twitter was already having problems.  It has been losing the 10% of content providers that provide 90% of the tweets and, roughly, 50% of the revenue for some time.  Elon’s actions has accelerated that trend.  Simultaneously he has exposed his advertisers to having their brands associated with Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, and full gamut of bigots and hate groups.

    Twitter has entered the MySpace death spiral.

  18. 18.

    trollhattan

    @Dangerman: Good. Maybe lightning can strike twice for Dorsey and Elon can find himself owning the Rambler brand of social media sites.

    One of them is smart.

  19. 19.

    SmallAxe

    Those H1-B’s shouldn’t have much problem getting placed again, I used to work for an Indian owned US based company that specializes in just that and they weren’t the only ones. Lot of profit margin for them in people too

  21. 21.

    Burnspbesq

    The only scenario that makes sense is that Elon is planning to sell a significant amount of Tesla stock in 2024, and he’s running Twitter into the ground in order to generate capital loss carryovers to shelter his Tesla gains.

    Or maybe he’s just an asshole.

  22. 22.

    trollhattan

    @Anoniminous: Because it’s a matter of when, and not if Trump gets reinstated, that’s not going to help Twitter’s future even a little.

    Plus, the goobers will be wondering “Hey, I thought I had to hate Twitter. I’m confused, now I love Twitter?”

  24. 24.

    Betty

    I see some good folks have started accounts at mastodon.social. It looks like alternatives to Twitter will be available.

  27. 27.

    Lady WereBear

    I listened to the latest Opening Arguments podcast where the lawyer explains why his call was wrong: this is a catastrophe of a business decision that has cut Musk’s worth in HALF.

    <Dr Evil pinkie>One hundred billion dollars!</evil>

    The comedian of the pair agreed that this was rare brilliance, that no one could have seen this coming.

  28. 28.

    cain

    @Mousebumples: Honestly, i’m having a lot of fun out here in mastodon – the experience is getting close to what I get on twitter. Plus, there is no commercial ads, there is no algorithms trying to show you “people” ala right wingers. You can express your true liberal self.  :-)

  29. 29.

    Ken

    I’ve also seen reports that he’s looking for additional savings by reducing Twitter’s use of cloud storage and network services. I’ve seen it compared to a farmer thinking he can cut back on costs by reducing his acreage.

  30. 30.

    Baud

    @cain:

    Do they have an app?

    I just looked at their mobile site and kind of liked it.  One of the reasons I’m not on twitter is that I could never get into the format. I don’t know why, but the mastodon mobile site seems a little cleaner to me. (Not that I’ve spent a lot of time there).

  31. 31.

    Mousebumples

    @cain: thanks for the rec! I can’t balance more than Twitter for now, but I’ll keep mastodon in mind for post-Midterms. 😊

  32. 32.

    Anoniminous

    Guardian reporting the entire Twitter moderation team has been axed.

    At this rate Twitter may not survive to the end of the year

  35. 35.

    MobiusKlein

    @Eunicecycle: ​
     

    The workaround for mass layoffs is to keep paying folks for 60 more days as severance, and announce the layoffs now. So folks have their last days, but the official last day is much later.

  36. 36.

    lowtechcyclist

    @trollhattan: LOL!

    Of course, she makes this absurd distinction: “a true authoritarian accepts responsibility.”  In which case, there’s been nearly no ‘true authoritarians’ in the history of the world.  Such bullshit.

    And as far as his being too lazy, that doesn’t matter. If he were to be elected President again (not possible – he can only be elected twice, and that’s already happened, or so they say!), there’s already a team waiting in the wings to help him take full advantage of it.  It won’t be like last time where he selected a Cabinet of people who mostly still had the occasional scruple.

  37. 37.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Betty: It looks like alternatives to Twitter will be available.

    I never had a Twitter account so this is all just a spectator sport for me.

    My understanding is that the tech behind Twitter is pretty basic. The asset is their user base, specifically the twitter feeds of so many celebrities (like Cole for instance) and the ability to interact with them.

    So there are LOTS of alternatives to Twitter technologically, but is any starting to emerge as the one with the user base that people want to actually be part of?

    Also, it appears that advertising (“I DEMAND that you spend your ad dollars on my platform!”) appears to be one more thing Genius Business Guy Musk doesn’t understand.

    Edit: Maybe the time is ripe for WaterGirl to stand up a new “BJ Social” twitter-alternative and rake in the billions.

  38. 38.

    Llelldorin

    Musk: [fires entire curation team]

    Also Musk: “But we haven’t changed anything with respect to curation!”

  40. 40.

    Eolirin

    Mastodon is going to have issues if it starts to scale. One of the big reasons why you need these massive companies for social media is so you can manage content moderation. It’s a bigger resource requirement than engineering if you’re going to maintain trust in the platform. Mastodon is basically open source and crowd operated; every node has control of and responsibility for how it’s operated.

    This means there’s no real capacity to handle the moderation demands of scale. And I’m not sure there’s a mechanism to get to it either.

    Someone would have to start a new company with the intent of trying trying to grow to Twitter like size.

  42. 42.

    Noskilz

    About the only upside I see of this is that my understanding is that tanking Twitter will also financially hurt Musk very badly. I hate to see twitter go, as it can be extremely useful, but Musk seems determined to drive it into a brick wall as hard and as fast as possible so I doubt it will be around much longer.

  43. 43.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Eunicecycle: There are two major loopholes for that law:

    1. You can fire someone ‘for cause’ and the law doesn’t apply. In this case, good luck convincing anyone that half the company would be fired for cause.
    2. He can ‘fire’ people today and remove their access but keep them on payroll for 60 days and that’ll get around it.
  45. 45.

    Fair Economist

    I’ve seen people I follow and like moving to Counter.Social, tribel, and Mastodon. I intend to set up accounts on all three. I haven’t decided whether to use my real identity, this pseudonym, or my Twitter pseudonym, which was set up to be a ****posting account but sort of got more serious when COVID came.

  48. 48.

    rikyrah

    Seems as if Pastor Bryant’s Scorched Earth Sermon on Walker hit a nerve.

    Douglas A. Blackmon (@douglasblackmon) tweeted at 11:28 PM on Wed, Nov 02, 2022:
    After ignoring years of explicit political activity by 1000s of white preachers pushing @GOP candidates across the USA, @nytimes now mysteriously questions legality of “Black pastors” expressing doubts about morality of @HerschelWalker. Astonishing.
    1/3

    Douglas A. Blackmon (@douglasblackmon) tweeted at 11:28 PM on Wed, Nov 02, 2022:
    Weirdly, @NYTimes story 2 weeks ago about ultra-conservative white evangelical pastors openly SUPPORTING @HerschelWalker didn’t have a single word about whether *those* preachers were violating federal law…
    2/3

     

    Douglas A. Blackmon (@douglasblackmon) tweeted at 11:28 PM on Wed, Nov 02, 2022:
    @NYTimes hasn’t said *anything* about law against churches & pastors endorsing candidates since 2018 & did so then only because Trump–endorsed by rightwing preachers everywhere–ordered IRS to ignore violators & promised (falsely) to REPEAL the law.
    3/3

  49. 49.

    cain

    @Baud: So I use Tusky for android – I think Mastodon has one called unintuitively called ‘Mastodon’.

    I know the guy who started this project, he and I used to be coworkers at a company. On mastodon.social, the join rate has been on a daily rate last week Tuesday: 40k, Wednesday: 70k – so the rate of additions is not insignificant – we had a mass migration about the same size about 3 or 4 years ago – where the LBGTQ+ community moved wholesale off of twitter due to harassment.

    Keep in mind, the numbers I am giving you is for hte main mastodon.social server there are a lot of other servers that are seeing growth.

  51. 51.

    dnfree

    @trollhattan: Don’t knock Ramblers!  We had a 1966 Rambler that we bought in 1976, and we were still driving it into the 2000s.  People routinely got 200,000 miles out of their Ramblers in a time when you couldn’t say that about many brands.

  54. 54.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Fair Economist: FWIW, the guy who runs Counter.Social has a documented history of racism, homophobia and transphobia (and I believe anti-Semitism as well) that have been documented with receipts.

    Plus it’s literally a one-man show — including handling moderation — so it’s gonna have significant scaling issues.

  57. 57.

    Kay

    We have a stamping company here who have been desperate for workers since 2020 (partly because they are a bad employer) and I found out this week they have brought in Haitian workers (legally- with a work visa). Apparently the company is transporting the Haitians 70 miles from and to Toledo, where the Haitians are residing. I have never seen this before. I have seen lots and lots of Mexicans brought in (again, legally) and also what the local employers call “Texicans” brought in (undocumented brought from Texas to Ohio to do agricultural work) but Haitians are a first for this area.

    I’ll never understand why employers aren’t more pro-immigrant. They all know damn well who is doing all this work. It’s silly. Just tell the truth.

  59. 59.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    I’ll never understand why employers aren’t more pro-immigrant.

    Bargaining power.  A scared workforce is a docile and pliable workforce.

  63. 63.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Baud: Exactly, if you are afraid your visa will be yanked if you get fired, you will not complain about excessive overtime, unpaid overtime, sexual harassment, racism, dangerous working conditions.

  64. 64.

    Eolirin

    @NotMax: They forked Mastodon’s open source code base, yes. But anyone can do that as long as they follow the license agreement. Gab is based on them too.

  65. 65.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    I just don’t see how we ever get any kind of modernized or reasonable immigration reforms.

    Conservatives have now been running on “scaaaaary immigrants!” for almost 20 years, since the Bush reform effort collapsed – killed by the Right, not the Left. They can’t let go of immigrant bashing now- it’s become central to the GOP brand.

    Maybe some of the Haitians will settle here. Our population is too old and young people who are ambitious or have anything on the ball get the hell out. I would welcome new people. Toledo took Syrian  refugees and once the screeching by media and conservatives died down no one ever mentioned it again.

  67. 67.

    trollhattan

    @Kay: Wouldn’t you say it goes back at least as far as the Chinese Exclusion Act?

    Only “open” immigration I can recall in my lifetime that Republicans supported were Cubans fleeing Castro and the South Vietnam “boat people.” Those furriners at least were helping stick it to the commies.

    There was the Bracero Program, but those guys had to go home after harvest.

  69. 69.

    trollhattan

    Josh Hawley has thoughts.

    November 4, 2022 at 2:03 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard

    Politico: “Josh Hawley doesn’t just want to flip the Senate by electing fellow Republicans Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. He wants to bend the entire GOP conference with a bloc of like-minded senators. The Missouri senator, who helped convince both candidates to run, will go to Arizona on Friday for Masters, Ohio for Vance on Saturday and then finish the campaign on Monday in Missouri for GOP candidate Eric Schmitt.”

    IOW Mich McConnell is a moderate Loser and must go.

  71. 71.

    Geminid

    @Fair Economist: I noticed Marcy Wheeler say that while she is still on Twitter she started a Mastodon account this spring. I guess she cross posts her tweets to Mastodon.

  72. 72.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Toledo took Syrian  refugees and once the screeching by media and conservatives died down no one ever mentioned it again.

    Remember the Ground Zero Mosque?  There’s always a panic for the GOP to create and exploit.

  74. 74.

    Will

    Why do we keep focusing on the weird things with Musk that really don’t matter? Like why aren’t we focusing on real issues like how he complains about government funding while sucking the tit of the government? Or how he talks all this talk about free speech but at the same time is highly dependent on authoritarian governments like Saudi Arabia and China?

    H-1B visa holders are likely the cheapest employees on the books, they are likely going to be the last ones to be fired. This plight of hard work you speak of isn’t a plight to them, excessive hours to us is just normal work to a lot of them. If you’ve ever worked outside the western world, you see something more akin to when our society was when it just industrialized with crazy long hours and very little personal time. There is a reason why companies love getting these types of employees. My wife’s boss has to logon and tell her to stop working almost every night.

    Also, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to get wheepy about some nerds having to work 80 hours a week and sleep on a floor. God forbid they ever had to have a job where they had to do 60 hours in either freezing or flaming weather or couldn’t show up hungover cause every piece of equipment around them could maul them. We’ve jumped the shark when the idea of white collar employees having to pull some all nighters is an issue of cruelty. At one point I spent six months straight working close to 70 hours a week in India, twitter engineers crying after a week of it just disgusts me.

  75. 75.

    JaneE

    The stories of Twitter employees working 87 hour weeks and sleeping on the floor no doubt include a bunch of H-1B holders who are from places like India or former Soviet republics.

    That was the case when the company I worked for hired a consulting firm to install a purchased software system, at least the 87 hour part.  Our consultants were from India and South Africa.   They could afford apartments, at least, but most had roommates – also employed by the consulting firm.  Because their employer was the consulting firm they could move from company to company so long as the firm had projects for them to work on.  Indentured servitude really is a good way to think of it.   If you complained too much, or if the consulting firm didn’t have a job lined up when the old one finished, you might find yourself on the next plane home.

    Not all employers were exploitive.  When I retired my replacement was on a H1-B visa working for some company in the SF area.  When the project he was working on was winding down, his employer let him do job hunting on their dime, gave him a glowing recommendation, and helped facilitate the transfer of his visa to our company.  My company got him a permanent work visa.  He is still here 20 years later, but I don’t know if he naturalized or not.

    From what I heard in my job area(IT), there were far more exploitive employers than not, at least 20 some years ago.  Employers could not legally pay substantially less than they would have paid an American worker, but the working conditions effectively cut that pay rate in half or more.

  76. 76.

    Captain C

    @Another Scott:

    We’ve drawn intense public scrutiny by acting like the biggest assholes on God’s green earth for eight days, and we’re all out of ideas.

    I think to most of the right-wing “free speech” humpers, “free speech” actually means “I get to yell horrible things in people’s faces and they have to like me for it and it doesn’t apply the other way around!”  It’s like that Twitter thread of a few days ago which pointed out that TFG cultists, erstwhile Teabaggers, and other alt-Right abusers don’t want an echo chamber, they want a space where they get to abuse the Libs, and the Libs are forced to sit and take it.

  77. 77.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Will:

    Also, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to get wheepy about some nerds having to work 80 hours a week and sleep on a floor. God forbid they ever had to have a job where they had to do 60 hours in either freezing or flaming weather or couldn’t show up hungover cause every piece of equipment around them could maul them.

    Tech employee and director here. Overworking your employees for short periods of time isn’t ideal, but it happens. Having a regular expecation of 60+ hour weeks is a bad fucking idea for a number of reasons. It also makes for huge risks at software companies, since it tends to introduce security and compliance issues that have the capacity to really fuck the company over.

    Tech companies are also different these days in that you can’t get away, ever. There are notes from this article about how not only are they working 80 hour weeks, they’re getting called at 3 in the morning at home in order to push changes. And yes, that’s pretty damn awful and should be called out, particularly for the H1-B holders who took the job with an expectation of work hours and are now jerked around with a vastly different situation they can’t complain about without getting booted out of the country.

  78. 78.

    rikyrah

    Since it seems as if it was Saudi and Russian money that bought Twitter, I doubt Musk cares. I think his entire point was to ruin it.

  79. 79.

    rikyrah

    @Captain C:

    I think to most of the right-wing “free speech” humpers, “free speech” actually means “I get to yell horrible things in people’s faces and they have to like me for it and it doesn’t apply the other way around!”

     

    They have always had Free Speech. What they want is FREEDOM FROM CONSEQUENCES OF SAID SPEECH.

     

    They, and yes, I do mean White Men, want the ability to party like it’s 1922, where they could say anything they want and ‘ those people’ just had to take it. If it bothered them, too bad. They weren’t allowed to ‘talk back’.

     

    1922

    They wanna party like it’s 1922

  80. 80.

    James E Powell

    @Kay:

    They can’t let go of immigrant bashing now- it’s become central to the GOP brand.

    They have bigotry & almost nothing else.

  81. 81.

    MisterDancer

    @Will: This plight of hard work you speak of isn’t a plight to them, excessive hours to us is just normal work to a lot of them.

    I’ve worked with, and even befriended, my share of H-1B people over the years — on top of many, many remote workers. I’ve also worked, for months on end, 90-100 hour work weeks in Tech.

    They are, to a person, just as Human as anyone who worked from, came from, anywhere else. They weren’t “made to work harder than ‘native’ Americans,” or whatever BS excuse you just tried to make for Musk’s abusive approach here.

    To your comment about “wheepy”(sp) about the work weeks: My Mom was suffering from a lingering cancer that eventually took her, while I was working those hours, hours away from her. And I worked it, in part, because she was denied disability, so my money was the only thing keeping her afloat for YEARS.

    You’ve gonna jump to some “but you are an outlier, MisterDancer” bollicks. And I’m going to point out that the dignity of work shouldn’t depend on on a MFer “deserves” it, or not.

    Everyone deserves just as much respect and work dignity as anyone born/living anywhere else. I really hesitate to say more because I can feel the red rising up in my vision.

    You need to check yourself.

  82. 82.

    Captain C

    @Anoniminous:

    Simultaneously he has exposed his advertisers to having their brands associated with Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, and full gamut of bigots and hate groups.

    Plus Tesla and SpaceX’s business partners.

  83. 83.

    Captain C

    @rikyrah:

    They have always had Free Speech. What they want is FREEDOM FROM CONSEQUENCES OF SAID SPEECH.

     

    They, and yes, I do mean White Men, want the ability to party like it’s 1922, where they could say anything they want and ‘ those people’ just had to take it. If it bothered them, too bad. They weren’t allowed to ‘talk back’.

    This, except perhaps 1922 might be generous.  For at least some, 1852 seems likely.

  84. 84.

    MisterDancer

    @MisterForkbeard: There are notes from this article about how not only are they working 80 hour weeks, they’re getting called at 3 in the morning at home in order to push changes.

    It’s also a great way to get changes that break systems and open security vulnerabilities, sometimes in ways no one notices for years.

    Example: Tesla is recalling one million cars over power windows that won’t stop.

    And that’s far from the only Tech issue Tesla has. And yeah, I point to horrific ideas like the above becoming the norm as your key source for quality slipping so badly there.

    …esp. when you add to it all the sexism and racism stinkin’ up the joint.

  85. 85.

    JaneE

    @Will: I am not sure they can legally fire American citizens and keep the H-1B visa holders.  You can’t get the visa unless there is a lack of qualified Americans.  Musk would have a hard time justifying that all the visa holders are competent and all the Americans were not after announcing he is going to cut half the work force, regardless.

    Even people who love what they do rarely put in 90 hour weeks for years at a time.  H-1Bs are for 3 years.  American workers have a choice to quit or not.  H-1B visa holders do not.

  86. 86.

    Martin

    So, the situation for laid off Twitter employees is so-so. The vast majority of them are in the valley and non-competes are illegal in CA, so they have a LOT of local companies they can move to without picking up house. If you could pick anywhere to get laid off as a tech worker, this is where you’d want to get laid off.

    The downside, adtech is getting hit hard, and a lot of the particular expertise of these workers is in adtech. Google and Meta are both getting kicked hard right now and they aren’t hiring, and they were the two most obvious local places to apply. Twitter has eliminated their whole human rights team. That’s pretty portable, but not in huge demand. Their ML teams are all gone, but they should be able to find new jobs pretty easily. Lots of demand for ML.

  87. 87.

    Will

    @MisterDancer:

    I like how “befriending” a couple of H-1B workers just zipped right past that I spent six months straight working 70+ hours a week in India. That was just a phase of a project, I lived there for years. My wife is Indian. I have a very good idea of how a lot of them think, and yes, they think most Americans are lazy and barely work. They rip on their American counterparts and their “American hours” that they work. It’s not bullshit that they have a different mindset about what is acceptable practices versus what white collar Americans think is.

    I don’t think you’re an outlier. I’m sorry you couldn’t be with your mom when she passed. A colleague’s dad died and he could not make the trip home from India. My last grandparent passed while I was in India. I have other friends that have had to miss a funeral for a relative. It’s awful that we don’t get to be there always, but I think that is something that has been happening for a long time.

  90. 90.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @MisterDancer: Thank you! Exhausted, stressed out people make mistakes.  Coding mistakes can cost a LOT of money.  Constant long workweeks, and constant lack of enough sleep will cause long term health problems.

  91. 91.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Will: You spent sometime in India and so now you have become an expert on all Indian tech workers, H1B visa holders. You know how all of them think. Is that an accurate summary of your comment?

  92. 92.

    gene108

    Lot of IT staffing firms hire H1-B visa holders. As long as the economy is alright there are firms willing to hire them.

    The real injustice to Indian H1-B visa holders is the ridiculous fucking backlog to get a Green Card after applying. If an Indian national applied for a GC on or before May or July 2012, depending on employment category, they can start the final application for their GC’s.*

    Stupid country quotas restrict GC’s based on nationality. Many countries don’t come close to using their quotas, like say Norway or Brazil. Congress just needs to eliminate country quotas and lump all permanent visas into one pool.

    They need to do this for family sponsored visas, as well. The backlog for Mexicans sponsoring family in some categories is backed up 20+ years.

    This is just another way to keep the myth that America is predominantly a white nation of European ancestry, because immigration from the rest of the world was banned and now restricted. There’d be a lot more diversity, if immigration laws hadn’t so heavily favored Europeans.

     

    *G&T’s daughter in law took years to get her GC to come here, and I doubt her country of origin has a backlog.

  95. 95.

    gene108

    @Will:

    H-1B visa holders are likely the cheapest employees on the books,

    I’ve worked in IT staffing in the U.S. for years, and H1-B workers were a lot more aggressive in demanding top dollar than Americans.

  96. 96.

    Will

    @schrodingers_cat: Uh, what? I argued fired people aren’t deserving of any sympathy? Where do you even get that?

    I said I don’t have any sympathy for desk jockeys whining over having to do a 80 hour week in an air controlled office space.

    And that’s the point. It’s only been a week. This hasn’t been something that has been ongoing for months. Before tech, that used to be the implicit bargain of a lot of white collar jobs. Cushy most of the year, then crazy hours come tax season or whatever company related reporting season. If Elon is still pushing 80+ hour weeks months from now then he deserves whatever failures arise from it.

  97. 97.

    MisterDancer

    @Will: Let me take you back:

    If you’ve ever worked outside the western world, you see something more akin to when our society was when it just industrialized with crazy long hours and very little personal time. There is a reason why companies love getting these types of employees. My wife’s boss has to logon and tell her to stop working almost every night.

    HOW IS THIS GOOD? The point should be to enable humane working hours, not drive people to overwork.

    This is what I’m reacting to. I don’t really give a fuq where you lived, Human Rights didn’t just wander into a corner, gibbering to themselves, because you married a South Asian woman!

    I mean, are you going to support all the toxic things American culture forces from it’s members — things this blog talks about all the damn time — because other cultures are “weak” in that regard? Or is it worth it, as @s_c among others has asked us to do time and again, to actually examine our assumptions about South Asian culture?

    I’ve had to learn a lot, myself, over the decades, about the region and the cultures and lives involved. Still am learning. Work is…not my only connect with the culture, let’s say, but that’s a very personal note for now. Suffice to say that no, I vehemently reject the idea that you can “work Indian people ‘harder’ than Americans” because they…trash-talk American work ethic?

    Schoolyard-level chatter cannot be the core of a real work policy, Will. It just can’t.

    (And that leaves aside that India is Not a Monolith.)

  98. 98.

    kalakal

    @EmbraceYourInnerCrone:

    Years ago in the UK EDS were notorious amongst IT workers for hiring graduates at crap money and pulling the “we need you to work this weekend, tonight etc. We can’t pay you overtime but we’ll make it up to you in your annual review* ” trick. They got a lot of govt contracts and did well for a few years before the shoddy quality of their work caught up with them. They had an insane staff turnover and practically no experienced staff below management level.

    I once got a contract with a utility company who’d just fired EDS, they’d missed one deadline too many, so the company in desperation brought in freelancers like myself.

    * Narrator: They never did

  99. 99.

    Will

    @MisterDancer: I don’t think it’s good. I would love if society was better. It’s why I vote Democratic. It’s why I’ve volunteered. It’s why I’ve donated.

    My issue is crying over white collar workers at Twitter having to work a long week. Blue collar workers have always had it hard. We made their jobs a little better for them for a brief amount of time and how did we reward them after that? We shipped that job to other parts of the world and laid them off.

    So yeah, I find it utterly moronic that I should feel sympathy for some white collar workers that have had to put in a week of 80+ hours.

    I also want to be clear, I don’t feel it’s ok to exploit H-1B workers. My expression is that while many here may see being asked to work a 80 hour week and sleep on the floor as a plight, many of the H-1B workers wouldn’t.

  100. 100.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Will: My expression is that while many here may see being asked to work a 80 hour week and sleep on the floor as a plight, many of the H-1B workers wouldn’t.

    No one died and appointed you to be the spokesperson of H1-B workers. You are not a fucking mind reader.

  101. 101.

    Will

    @gene108: I agree with that they are much more aggressive in arguing about pay than American colleagues. For some reason that has become taboo in America in the past few decades. My father likes to brag about how Boomers were so much more aggressive, but doesn’t really have an answer for when I ask why it was that such behavior became frowned upon when their generation got in charge.

    That said, the two companies I dealt with, even after their salary push, the H-1B employee was likely just under the total compensation for an American employee. Now, total cost to the company, I can see where with all the cost of covering paperwork could make them more expensive in some cases.

  102. 102.

    MisterDancer

    @Will: My issue is crying over white collar workers at Twitter having to work a long week.

    OK. Let’s take that apart, starting with what’s said in the OG post:

    These two employees were US citizens and engineers, so they’re well-paid and probably going to be fine if they’re laid off.

    And then:

    The stories of Twitter employees working 87 hour weeks and sleeping on the floor no doubt include a bunch of H-1B holders who are from places like India or former Soviet republics. These people have few choices but to work like dogs, and few opportunities if they’re laid off today.

    So one can surmise mistermix’s concerns was with the status of the H-!B folx specifically.  He explicitly doesn’t give the US citizen ones much focus.

    And yes, I skimmed the comments again. There’s basically nothing here about the long work week.

    So you understand why your comments come out of left field? That none of us were wasting digits over the long work week in and of itself, and that we were — and are — overall far more concerned about the long-term status of the H-1B folx? That, indeed, there’s a lot of discussion here about the layoffs and the potential WARN Act violations first and foremost?

    To jump from that to what read a LOT like “those H-1Bs don’t deserve our sympathy” was….well, jarring is far from the right word.

  104. 104.

    Will

    @MisterDancer: I just read it a different way I guess. The fact that it was two US citizens talking about awful it was that there was going to be this 80+ hour work week I took it as the Americans complaining.

    The part I did agree with though is that yes, the company has the H-1B employees by the balls cause they can’t just switch jobs. If Elon abuses this, then he deserves every failure that comes from this. If Twitter falls, it will wreck him. He will lose SpaceX and Tesla. And he will deserve every single smack of the branch on his way down.

  105. 105.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Will: You haven’t spoken to every H1-B visa holder in the United States, past and present.

    You are making racist generalizations.

    ==============================

    H1-B visa allows you a grace period of 60 days after your employment is terminated. You can also demand the employer pay for your trip back to the country of your last residence. So yes they can and do switch jobs.

    H1-B visa holders may not have as many options as GC holders and citizens but they usually have options because they have skills that are in demand.

  106. 106.

    Tony G

    I’ve never known a millionaire, let alone a multi-billionaire, but it seems like something has changed about plutocrats — at least in the United States, and at least within the past 20 years or so.  Very rich people have always been greedy, of course, but in the past their pathway to accumulating and maintaining their wealth was often by hiring people to build and maintain corporations that actually produced things.  Elon Musk is the exemplar of the new breed of greedy rich guys — but there are many others like him.  It seems like Musk is so bored by his massive wealth that he’s happy to throw away $44 billion on a company that he then proceeds to deliberately destroy.  He has so much money that it literally doesn’t matter.  After he destroys Twitter he’ll have a net worth of about $150 billion, down from $200 billion.  So what?  It’s make believe money.  Our “system” rewards narcissistic overgrown children who have such a massive amount of money that not even the money matters anymore.  Very sick.

  107. 107.

    trollhattan

    @Tony G: Once was supposedly common practice among the truly rich to not flaunt their true wealth–live nicely but not ostentatiously. Those who “need to know” know.
    That surely has changed, and they’re hammer and tongs deadset on not only outshining all the other plutocrats, they have to MAKE MORE because there can only be one World’s Richest DoucheDude.​
    ETA I know technical millionaires, but the term seems to have morphed from “worth a million” to makes a million or more per year.

  108. 108.

    Hamlet of Melnibone

    @Tony G:

    Musk’s finances are not as rock solid as you would expect given his net worth.  His wealth is all Telsa stock, and he has borrowed extensively against that stock to fund his other ventures like SpaceX ( which probably isn’t worth a whole lot economically) and now Twitter ( which is worth a whole lot less than he paid for it ).

    If Tesla hits a rough patch and is suddenly valued more like an auto company than a tech stock, he could end up upside down pretty quickly.

    I find it a little fascinating that the richest man in the world is probably more likely to go bankrupt than me.

  109. 109.

    Tony G

    @trollhattan: Yeah.  The old style plutocrats were no better than the current ones, but they seem to have felt the need to hide, or at least not openly flaunt, their wealth.  Maybe the current breed thinks that their hired security services will protect them no matter what.  Maybe they’re right.

  111. 111.

    Geminid

    @Hamlet of Melnibone: Tesla stock dropped 3.6% today while the S&P 500 rose 1.2%. Its Price to Earnings Ratio is still around 70 to 1. Toyota’s P/E is about 10.5.

    I don’t have a very large base of knowledge in this area, but my uninformed opinion is that Tesla’s stock price is a bubble sustained largely by Musk’s personal prestige. Such as it is.

  112. 112.

    JR in WV

    I worked as a contracted programmer become team leader back in the late 1980s. When the company passed around a memo about required OT going forward, (48+ hours a week) the end of the memo said “This doesn’t mean JR and Debbie can cut back to 48 hours!” because we were doing 6 – 12 hour days at that point.

    We were building the conversion machine to produce the new database from the old database.

  113. 113.

    Starfish

    @Geminid: The people who were buying Teslas were the tech bros that Musk fired today. He also mixes up his businesses, so he is bringing in Tesla and Space X engineers to deal with whatever nonsense he is doing at Twitter.

  115. 115.

    Geminid

    @Starfish: I don’t know about SpaceX, but Tesla is not Musk’s company. He’s just the biggest stockholder. It seems to me he’s setting himself up for shareholder lawsuits by putting Tesla staff on Twitter work.

  116. 116.

    Hamlet of Melnibone

    @Geminid:

    I agree with your assessment of Tesla stock.  I think there is potentially large downside risk in it, which could make Musk insolvent, given that he has borrowed massively against it.

    I wouldn’t expect insolvency, but I think it is definitely in the range of outcomes.  I think it is crazy to be that rich and still handle your finances in a way that could lead to bankruptcy.

    I’ve never understood people who take those risks when the utility of 10 billion vs 100 billion is so negligible.

  117. 117.

    Starfish

    @NotMax: Some of the engineers that I know who were let go today had been there for a number of years. There are going to be some learnings on what was well documented and what existed as institutional knowledge.

  121. 121.

    terry chay

    @geg6: I don’t think so, but from leaked/discovered messages during the lawsuit, Dorsey was one of the pro Musk crowd so that will go down in flames. Both have a fundamental misunderstanding on how you make money on a social network (advertising based on strong content moderation)

  122. 122.

    Ruckus

    @trollhattan:

    Some of the difference between today’s billionaires is the tax and investment systems. Warren Buffet once said that he paid a lower income tax rate than his secretary making $50K a year (This was a number of years ago) The way a very large majority of his income was made let it be taxed at a lower rate than her’s. So not only did he make far more, he kept a higher percentage than she did. He was quoted as saying it was wrong. This concept wasn’t this way a few decades ago, billionaires paid, if not a fair share, at least a far more reasonable share.

  123. 123.

    Chris T.

    @Old School:

    How much does Balloon-Juice charge per month for me to get a blue checkmark next to my name?

    (Pinky finger thing a la Dr Evil) One meeel-yun dollars!*

    *Payable to me

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