the fundamental best use of twitter was being able to say stuff like this to people who would never otherwise hear it. https://t.co/cXEngHlrqR
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) November 18, 2022
megan, the only reason anyone has ever employed you is that they are paying for you to tell them that what they're doing is actually good. you hear the laugh track and you imagine that it's an audience. it's not. it never was. you are as catastrophic a failure as has ever lived.
— the immortal data science of M-L (@revhowardarson) November 18, 2022
This is the first time Elon has done anything in his life and you’re trying to give other people credit
— Guy Freire (@guy_freire) November 18, 2022
megan the richest man in the world bought a plane midflight, shot the pilot in the head, and pointed it straight down. blaming the stewards is dumb as shit.
— pumpkin spice matte (@sabrmattrics) November 18, 2022
they got paid vastly more than their share of the company was worth and then three months more, and then when asked to eat shit in order to service bad debt in order to provide a platform for neo-Nazis, they told Elon Musk to eat their collevctive assholes https://t.co/vp5o64D6St
— the immortal data science of M-L (@revhowardarson) November 18, 2022
But ‘seriously’…
the bargain is that a particular amount of labor is available at a particular price and if the purchaser does not like that quantity they can negotiate to pay a higher price. no one moralizes about grain or ball bearings having a fixed price per unit quantity. https://t.co/45uJBCMIaj
— the immortal data science of M-L (@revhowardarson) November 18, 2022
You think I'm joking, but I'm already working with Oxford on an updated version, and I was going to talk a lot about COVID, but this whole Twitter clusterf*ck is going to be part of the new book. It's like a Death of Expertise Broadway musical https://t.co/lz1H7JVCBU
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 18, 2022
you may have bought it but this site will always belong to us, you apartheid princeling bitchboy
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 18, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 268: There Are Only Two Questions
Enhanced Voting Techniques
WTF is McAgle’s trip, their employees, not family retainers.
bbleh
Well thank heaven people like David Brooks are still around to remind people how uncivil these sorts of remarks are!
sukabi
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: the employees didn’t kill twitter, Musk is…
Every day he walks in and makes uninformed, idiotic, impossible demands of employees he doesn’t value or respect and then reverses course…who would want to work in conditions like that?
redoubtagain
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Pampered, chauffeured daughter of a NYC building contractor, who has never had to extend herself for anything. AKA “Game recognize game.”
brendancalling
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #1)
Suzanne
Yes, that is right.
Good for them, if their boss wants them to work harder, he can pay them more.
Jesus, it’s a social network, it’s not brain surgery.
scav
Horrors! American Labor is apparently opting out of pledging to work harder for the same pay! How can American Businesses thrive and succeed if labor expects commensurate compensation?
frosty
I can’t get enough stories about the Twitter meltdown. The ~20 tweets earlier today about the shit the SREs and Operators have to manage, the psychiatric help for the moderators, the middle finger everyone gave Musk, the absolute necessity of Twitter to fight authoritarianism. And this, the ability of commoners to speak their minds to royalty like McMegan (Narrator: Really?).
Losing this site will be a disaster for millions, all for some narcissistic billionaire’s impulses. But I can’t stop reading about it.
Redshift
In some ways, my favorite part of this is muskrat tweeting out laughably out of date software development concepts and practices as part of his made-up “explanations” of what his super-genius intellect has determined is wrong with Twitter. (Like today’s asking engineers to send screenshots of their work!)
He built up this mystique of being Tony Stark, and is making painfully clear that the only part that’s real is he owns companies that do cool things.
scav
@Suzanne: Yea, brain surgeons wander the streets doing it for free. It’s the very bedrock of the American Heath System.
frosty
@scav: Governor Schaefer of the good state of Maryland did exactly that to Ms F and all state workers when he decided the workweek would now be 40 hours instead of 37.5 with no change in pay.
dmsilev
WaPo headline: “Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse”.
Yeah, pretty much.
Though I also liked this story from yesterday/this morning: Musk emails remaining Twitter staff to find “anyone who actually writes software”
Raoul Paste
Musk’s poll on Trump’s Twitter reinstatement is apparently open.
It’s rather irrelevant if Twitter implodes next week
Ken
One month ago: Twitter in fair shape, with advertisers and staff, and a couple of recent profitable quarter.
Now: Twitter in downward spiral, advertisers and staff walking away, saddled with hundreds of millions in quarterly debt payments.
Were I a columnist trying to figure out what happened, I’d start with: What has changed in the last month?
Ken
The Federalist Society has One Weird Plan to solve the problem! See, the Reconstruction Amendments were never properly ratified because <insert legal equivalent of technobabble>…
scav
@frosty: Ah, the CEO’s wet dream. Their personal hands on the law and law enforcement as the pointy end of HR.
HumboldtBlue
Elon has left an impression on the Twitter machine and the actual people who make it go, that’s for sure.
We laughed about Space Karen last night, no reason we can’t laugh about it again tonight.
Hungry Joe
Scene, to be played out hundreds (thousands?) of times:
INTERVIEWER, TO JOB APPLICANT: So, why did you leave your last place of employment? [Scrolls through resume] Oh, okay. Never mind.
Ken
What, not even in .NORM format?
Steeplejack
@Redshift:
Phony Stark, as someone said in an email to me today.
HumboldtBlue
@Ken:
Look at you, being sensible an’ stuff.
dmsilev
@Steeplejack: I tend to prefer “Pony Stark”, to memorialize the time he (allegedly) offered to buy an employee a horse in exchange for her giving him a handjob.
Suzanne
@scav: I’m saying that working at Twitter is, uhhhh, not that important.
Anoniminous
A former employee told WaPo layoffs and other departures “have left multiple critical systems down to two, one or even zero engineers.”
“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” the former employee said, according to the Post report. “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
TriassicSands
Maybe a masochist who believes that constant painful punishment is a good thing? Like a Trump voter.
Anoniminous
Ireland is set to review Twitter’s claim in Ireland as its so-called One Stop Shop (OSS) under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR.) One obligation is for Twitter to have a Data Protection Officer as a contact point for regulators. Damien Kieran, its first and only DPO, walked. So did Lea Kissner and chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty. These people, and their staffs, were responsible for security and privacy compliance with EU regulations. If Twitter loses its “main establishment” in Ireland any EU data protection authority would be able to act directly on concerns it has that local users’ data is at risk — with the power to instigate their own investigations and take enforcement actions. In fact the other EU watchful Data Protection Authorities may not sit on their hands waiting in the meanwhile. Under the GDPR, all these bodies have powers to make emergency interventions in certain circumstances that lets them derogate from the OSS — such as if they feel there is a pressing risk to local users’ data. So we could see other DPAs reaching for Article 66 powers and implementing their own urgency procedures against Twitter in their own markets. Each DPA of a country could levy fines of up to 4% of annual turnover with a potential total of 108% of Twitter’s 2021 $5.08 billion or $5.48 billion. Since Musk is sole Owner and a corporate shield does not protect against deliberate illegal behavior he could personally be on the stick for the fines.
Further, Twitter is under a compliance agreement with the FTC to keep it informed of new products and new product development. Failure to do so will result in failure to perform under the consent order resulting in billions of dollars of fines. And, again, corporate shield does not protect against deliberate illegal behavior so he could personally be on the stick for the fines.
Musk’s problems with Twitter are only beginning.
ETA: and add Musk’s blatantly, under EU, illegal demands on his labor force.
sukabi
@TriassicSands: nah….trump voters talk tough, but when push comes to shove they’d be first out the door, their “No fair! You can’t make me” battle cry wafting behind…
Ken_L
We are so grateful that as The Trump Show enters its final, unfunny season, America has provided a new hilarious series to provide lighter moments in these dark times.
All the best, Rest of the World
BruceFromOhio
Too long for a rotating tag, but a laborer can dream.
BruceFromOhio
@Anoniminous:
Said elsewhere, he should’ve bought Ticketmaster.
SFBayAreaGal
Okay, “bitchboy” has become one of my favorite swear words
Anoniminous
@BruceFromOhio:
LOL
Dangerman
All because a proven minority of people were pissed they couldn’t get off yanking their crank about Hunter Biden and (not) his laptop
ETA: Seriously, Elon, fuck you
Alison Rose
@Dangerman:
Now there’s a rotating tag if ever I saw one.
Rebelsdad (fka texasboyshaun)
Sic semper Moronis.
Rebelsdad (fka texasboyshaun)
@dmsilev: I just choked on my oatmeal and woke up the dog. Give me a warning next time!
Rebelsdad (fka texasboyshaun)
@TriassicSands: No, the Trump voter only likes pain if someone else (preferably darker than a snowflake) is the one experiencing the pain.
AnneWith
I keep scrolling through the comments & reaching for the heart button, which of course isn’t here because this isn’t Twitter.
I’m going to have some serious withdrawal when Twitter is gone.
mrmoshpotato
@bbleh:
Please refer to him by his proper name – David Fucking Brooks. :)
mrmoshpotato
@scav: Elon: My peasants are revolting!
scav
@Suzanne: eh, jobs done for corporations, especially for corporations that pay out gazillions to management and/or shareholders, should get paid. Even companies doing silly things like mere entertainment or a social network. And a lot of that is still damned skilled labor. I must be missing something really basic about what brain surgery is doing in your setup. I’m sticking with the labourer is worthy of his hire.
Citizen Alan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Megan McArdle would own slaves if it were legal to do so. Most Libertarians would. Hell, most Republicans would.
Martin
I’ve written about it before, but there’s a story here about Twitter labor that most people in this country really don’t get. It took me a long time to get it.
The valley is a lot of things. Mostly it’s a rejection of a lot of how the US economy works and exists as a kind of economic Narnia. There’s a few components to this:
Additionally, VC is focused on speed. Time to market is king, so the idea is cash fast, cash often. Yes that means hustle and crunch and a bunch of bad labor things, but it also means that ideas turn into industries here and not pretty much anywhere else. The bad labor things usually come with equity though, so that’s a potential upside. But the point of this is to reject traditional American finance and business creation and substitute a better model.
In the end you get a bunch of emergent benefits. Because employees are free to move, and have a LOT of options of where to move, they have a lot of agency – more than you see in most industries. Additionally, the VC model means that new options are constantly opening up, because new startups are constantly being created, and odds are your network has at least a few people with ready or nearly ready pitch decks to create new options in pretty short order. And yeah, the work is hard, but you usually have a LOT more investment in the job than a lot of people do, and I think you see a lot of that in the Twitter folks – they believed a lot in the work they were doing. If you’re part of a startup, you were probably part of the *idea* behind the startup, so you’re probably pretty invested in the work, in the product, and in the successful outcome. You probably have equity as well. For instance, my son is at a non-startup Bay Area company. It’s a midsized engineering to engineering company in the semiconductor area that nobody has ever heard up and likely never will. But it’s also employee owned, so he’s got an equity stake. He’s making 6 figures right out of a BS degree plus profit share, and if he lost his job today, he’d probably have a new 6 figure one somewhere in the valley in two weeks – certainly before his severance ran out.
This puts a lot of agency on labor but in different ways than labor does. You don’t have collective bargaining, but you do have a lot of individual bargaining power. You don’t get a lot of job protection, that tends to come from your irreplaceability to the company, but you get a lot of mobility and mobility is even encouraged. Apple doesn’t like to promote people into supervisory positions unless they’ve worked at other tech firms in the valley, so they’ll encourage you to leave for a few years and come back. It’s kind of weird, but it’s pretty common.
The valley really doesn’t work on that kind of top-down MOTU bullshit that McMegan buys into. A lot of people were horrified to see the Twitter Android engineer pushing back on Musk publicly, but that made perfect sense to me for a few reasons:
But in most any other industry, the CEO is to be treated like a godking. And if they’re also a billionaire, doubly so. McMegan buys into that.
The biggest problem with McMegan’s argument though is that she seems to think that the employees can save Twitter, and they just can’t. Musks sheer presence guarantees the destruction of Twitter, at least as we know it. That’s why Musk’s Pelosi tweet was so illuminating and critical to understand. So much of this concern about Musk taking over Twitter was how the moderation policy and application would change. That tweet told everyone that it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter. Musk owns the company, the moderation policy is *his* policy, and the moderation policy cannot apply to him. And his behavior, regardless of what the policy says, will enable more of that behavior by others. Singlehandedly, and against any effort the employees could employ, Twitter was going to change radically. Nobody but Musk drive off the advertisers. Literally not one other employee had a role in that. Ultimately Twitter with employees and Twitter without employees converge to the same thing. The only difference is when.
Martin
So, I know a few people that have been interviewing Twitter employees over the last week or two for jobs (ML, data science, SRE – not the higher profile employees). There are loads of open jobs. Nobody is treating these employees as damaged goods. Everyone knows that they had to leave. Some of them weren’t even clear on whether or not they were still employed. They’re not going to have any trouble finding new gigs.
Major Major Major Major
There is, I believe the saying goes, power in a union. So I’m told.
Major Major Major Major
So uhh we might close on our house in Denver in a month so I guess that’s happening. Going to try to make the builder’s lender buy down the rate. It’s sinking in… really gonna miss NYC.
Martin
I’ve heard some good perspective on the Twitter meltdown which McMegan might want to consider.
A lot of people in marginalized communities (or even entire communities) have been deplatformed by Twitter and other social media over the years. Warnings were always given that these tools could be used to deplatform those that remain, and now we’re getting the great deplatforming, not by some woke mob or whatever but buy a single billionaire asshole. 450 million people are going to be deplatformed by one person. Maybe we shouldn’t give someone that power? If Twitter is the public square, then it’s a public square owned by some guy. Makes it pretty clear it was never a public square, but a private one, that we were tolerated in until we weren’t.
If McMegan thinks that the employees are the fault of the square being destroyed, maybe that could have been avoided if the employees owned the square rather than someone else. Willing to bet that if those 7500 employees + 5000 contractors each had $3.5M in equity in the company rather than Herr Edgelord, we wouldn’t find ourselves where we are now.
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
Yo, you want a beer?
Martin
@HumboldtBlue: Always. Alas, you’re about a 5 day bike ride away for me.
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: I didn’t realize you were moving to Colorado. Congrats on the new house.
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne: Still need to arrange a lower rate, but it’s within reach!
And yeah our lease is up in January so we have to move somewhere, and we’re wanting to be near family for some other life plans…
lurker
@Martin: any interest in connecting up a little closer to home? I am in the vicinity of the valley and feel like we might have a few things to talk about…
also have some thoughts on a non-public way to get in touch if that is of interest.
LeftCoastYankee
It really can’t be highlighted enough how the McArdles of the world truly believe the “little people” should be grateful for the opportunity to enrich their “betters”.
Something has to fuel the excessive wealth of the few, and its clearly not Musk et al’s brilliance.
Martin
@lurker: I’m down in OC, but my kid is up in Scotts Valley.
But, most of my anonymity here was related to my job. For a while I had a job which caused me to be a person a LOT of people wanted to contact, so outside of my work identity, it was sort of impossible to have a non work contact surface.
I’m retired and don’t need to do that any longer, but I’m *really* used to it. But I’m exploring changing that. I should change that. So yeah, it is of interest having other ways to connect with a variety of people here.
It’s funny, in a work setting I could maintain a huge network of people, run organizations, teams of people, speak to huge audiences, but outside of work there’s a baseline of social anxiety that always there. My wife always has to cheerlead me a bit just to go out to dinner with friends. I wish I understood why that happened. Anyway, yeah, it’s a goal and people pushing me will help.
Mallard Filmore
@Major Major Major Major:
Think of it this way: The Adventure Continues.
Amir Khalid
I have the Government’s official General Election 15 dashboard open in a new tab. I will update as results come in tonight.
BlueGuitarist
@Amir Khalid: thank you
David Anderson
@Martin: I am hearing similar things from my networks
Frank Wilhoit
@frosty: Oh Lord, His Imperial Majesty William Donald Schaefer the First and Only et in sæcula sæculorum Amen. I’d forgotten about him. He was a proto-Trump, but with more of a Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx take.
Frank Wilhoit
@Ken: All of Twitter’s problems can be solved with wooden-table integration.
Anne Laurie
Megan would never do anything so down-market as owning slaves. She’d contract bonded personal labor services through the most ‘prestigious’ slave-renting corporation available.
And then write columns touting the market efficiency of being able to discard unsatisfactory human components without the messiness of personally having to deal with upsetting tales about ‘illness’ or ‘family issues’ or ‘not being able to meet Megan’s highly discriminating standards for service’.
LiminalOwl
@Martin: Thank you, this was really interesting. Might I share it with a young friend whom I’m trying to bring over to the Dark Side (i.e. this blog)?
When I moved to California (1984), I worked for a small startup in Santa Cruz. Very briefly—six weeks—and I was the secretary, not anything tech. But I learned to use WordStar on a CP/M machine, so when I left I moved up to the Bay Area and found work immediately. And I still have stories about the techbro who owned the startup and thought he owned the employees.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Years ago, I heard a song about unionization in the face of dangerous working conditions. The lines I remember to this day are: “We just come to work here. We don’t come to die.”
I repeated that to myself several times during my working years. Not that I was afraid of dying on the job. But the deal was I worked and they paid me. No more, no less.
mrmoshpotato
@Major Major Major Major: 🎶Rocky mountain basketball jones take me home.🎶
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
I don’t think many people have a problem with that aspect of VC. It’s the other end of things, when they buy an established business, sell off a bunch of the parts, and stick the core business with a shitload of debt which frequently kills the business in short order.
Maybe on some level it’s creative disruption. But most of us experience it as just plain disruption, when businesses where we used to shop go belly-up for no apparent reason other than to make some vulture capitalist a few billion dollars richer.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
That’s private equity, not venture capital.
Scamp Dog
@Major Major Major Major: Welcome back! We may have to put together an in-person meetup, since we haven’t done one since the pandemic started. Do you have a date for the move yet?
artem1s
@Martin:
So what would it take to move something like twitter to employee owned or public sphere? The only company I can think of that serves the whole public – especially marginalized groups – and manages to keep the trolls at bay – is Wikimedia. I assume they don’t have the capacity to absorb something like twitter and probably wouldn’t want to try to fix the old mess. And they wouldn’t pay what twitter pays. But they actually accomplish what they set out to do. It’s not glitzy or drama filled. It’s pretty boring. So there is the real rub. Can you have twitter without all the chaos and drama? or is chaos and drama Twitter’s real product?
kalakal
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Exactly. I’ve always cared as much about employers as they cared about me*. Some were great, some awful, most neutral. Somehow it seemed that the worst employers were also the ones that expected the peons to really love them.
*co- workers is a different matter
SFAW
@Ken:
OBVIOUSLY, it was Sleepy Joe Biden personally causing 3,000 percent inflation, of course. This ain’t rocket proctology, ya know.
Gvg
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Megan writes on economics and business pretentiously, but doesn’t understand a damn thing. It’s a problem. The problem is how widespread the ignorance is among people who should know better.
If people could same their jobs by working harder for a shitty boss, many, perhaps most would, but Musk is so badly incompetent for that particular circumstance that it is hopeless. It might be even if he was smarter because the debt service on that price might have made it hopeless. That is another thing that I have seen sink a lot of otherwise good businesses in my lifetime, getting “bought” by raiders and then having to pay for their own purchase often with pension funds. Anyway, Twitter was doomed by that price as well as it being that idiot Musk. Employees are powerless, time to go.
McArdle was too stupid to see it, proves she is worthless.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, this. All Tech jobs are basically temp jobs. All those Twitter employees were looking for a job when they found the ones they had and now it’s time for the next one. It’s that simple.
Gvg
@Baud: it is also often away for a retiring owner or family selling out to actually raid the pension fund for their own use by selling at a price that loads debt on the company. They get more money. Later, the company goes bankrupt and the pensions are reduced or gone. Popular outrage focuses on the new owners who are often bad news but some times they are just fools with money too and even if they aren’t I have seen those selling are often greedy con men who wanted all the money too and always resented stuff like pension funds they couldn’t touch….at best they didn’t think what would happen. Of course, ones you sell or retire you can’t control things anymore so there are limits.
Twitters board probably had to accept that offer under corporate law and probably knew it would kill the company too. Bad position to be in.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
One to remember.
Also she would point out that the word “slave” comes preloaded with too many negative connotations, that these are Fully Secured Guest Workers, chide the naysayers about forgetting these slaves have guaranteed life time employment and then lecture everyone about if it wasn’t for slavery, Wanger Group would killed them all when they sacked that town so slavery is really a human thing (“But still” McAgle, “One must be compassionate like I do, and over look my Au Pair’s screaming in her sleep from those nightmares. But, as I tell her, it’s not like she is unable to have another child.”)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Gvg: That’s how my grandfather lost his pension, the Mill Owners son embezzled it and fled to Brazil.
Keith P.
“Work 80 hours a week through Thanksgiving and Christmas….or take the rest of the year off with another month to look for a new job, on me. You have 24 hours to choose.” <- That still cracks me up.
Starfish
@frosty: I have been feeling like this for weeks. Some people on Mastodon pointed out that the reason Twitter people are so upset when they show up is dopamine withdrawal.
Imagine switching to decaf one morning.
Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major: You’re moving to Denver?!
Starfish
@Hungry Joe: A Twitter employee said that he was asked by a recruiter why he was considering leaving Twitter. 🤦🏻♀️
Starfish
@Major Major Major Major: Wait! You are coming here. I am so excited! Can we do a meetup?!
@Miss Bianca: Meetup? Yes?!
Miss Bianca
@Starfish: IKR? (*bounce bounce*)
Starfish
@Gvg: A Twitter employee wrote to Ask a Manager, and she called Elon a “chaos goblin.” You aren’t going to work harder for a chaos goblin.
azlib
If I was a coder at Twitter, I’d submit this beauty.
Starfish
@azlib: But in Scala, right?
Sister Golden Bear
@Martin: I agree, but with the following important caveat — if you’re not a young white man programmer/engineer, there’s definitely less employee agency and mobility (with exceptions for rock star programmers like the Asian woman fired from Twitter), or if you’re less willing to work at start-up or trade lower wages for stock options.
Working 60-80 hour weeks is one thing when you’re in your 20s, not so much when you’re older, and Silicon Valley is notoriously ageist. There’s an Alice in Wonderland quality where youth and vision (whether or not that vision tethered to reality) is valued, and experience (i.e. older workers) are thought to be hopelessly out of date and not innovative.
I work in user experience design, which is also an in-demand field, and after getting unexpected laid off in August, it’s been a slog trying to find work as a woman in her late 50s, although thank Maude I look younger than my age. The hot spot in the market is folks with only about 5 years experience — i.e. cheaper — where I’ve got 20 (actually more but I’ve intentionally downplayed how many years in the field). I’ve heard from recruiters that I’ve been passed over because I’ve got too much experience, even for senior-level years where they want people with 10+ years in the business, and where employers say they want highly experienced workers.
That said, yes for the reasons you mentioned a lot workers in tech do have more leverage. I recently got an offer, but while waiting for the official paperwork, the folks in the C-suite of my to-be employer are now considering delaying my start date by six weeks until Jan. 1 so they can make their end-of-year numbers look good. Had to play hardball with their recruiter, telling them that if they do that, I can’t guarantee I’ll still be available (Mama’s got bills to pay) and if they want to ensure I’ll work there — the managers below the C-suite really want me) — then they’ll need to pony up a starting bonus (or find other ways) to compensate me for the lost income. Waiting to hear back. Granted with the end of the year hiring slowdown, I’ve got a weaker hand, but it’s probably not a negotiating tactic I could use in other industries.
Subsole
@Martin: I just want to say your long posts are always enlightening.
azlib
@Starfish:
Nah. I think it looks more elegant in the original C.
SamR
Jeez even Doug might have winced at that smackdown of McMegan.
azlib
@Sister Golden Bear:
It is defintely ageist and was even for this old white guy. I was laid off in 2008 at the age of 58 and it took me nearly a year to be reemployed. Fortunately, I was able to do a bit of consulting before I landed contract work at a Berkshire Hathaway firm. They finally hired me full time in 2011 and I worked for them until 2021 when I retired from the field after 48 years.
Subsole
@Martin: I can kind of relate to that. Very good at work networks, absolutely have to be pushed into social events.
I think part of it (for me) lies in the fact that work provides a useful set of social frameworks that you can automatically use to define the relationship and a baseline that you can deviate from (or not). Coworkers might be strangers, but they are coworkers. There is an implied level of boundaries there. We all come, to a degree, pre-defined at work. That gives you a framework to fall back on as well.
Social events? Those folks are all strangers. You have to sit down and define them before you can relate to them. That can be…daunting. Because you also have to define yourself to them. And you don’t have those professional frameworks to fall back on or draw boundaries around certain areas.
Dunno. Just rambling.
Subsole
@Major Major Major Major:
Wonderful news! Congrats!
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: That’s not venture capital. That’s private equity. That’s a whole other group of people and much more reminiscent of conventional finance.
Turgidson
@Ken: They also want to reinstate Lochner so that employers can dictate oppressive conditions on employees with impunity.