https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-laid-off-twitter-workers-value-tech-jobs-work-2023-5
Discourse has recently raged over the apparent trend of "fake work," with some execs and investors claiming that tech companies overhired and gave people unnecessary jobs as a "vanity metric." Proponents of the theory say that this is why tech giants are now slashing so many jobs.
You make your company more prestigious by letting all kinds of people through the door.
Everybody knows that.
Yeah, the rationale was "hire every talent you can get, you'll need them someday. If not, at least you're starving the competition of good people by hoarding them." This resulted in the infamous "adult daycare center" video where the lady brags about how great her day is at Twitter and shows off all the amenities like yoga classes, espresso machine in the employee lounge, the rooftop wine bar, etc. It got all these chuds to scream "but you didn't do any actual work!" It was a wonderful moment. Well, at least before Elon took over and burned the place down.
It got all these chuds to scream “but you didn’t do any actual work!”
at a certain point you just have to either come to terms with the fact that market economies run your life by making arbitrary and dumbass decisions or go mad
like yeah they get rewarded for no actual work because this isn't a meritocracy
Except the imperial proletariat still has to do actual work
I'm not sure if I should support this because it lets workers shake the money tree at the expense of a large corporation, or opposite it because it lets the tech sector exaggerate its own economic importance (which has no doubt had negative effects on various municipal planning decisions made in the bay area over the last few decades.)
I vote to opposite it because it creates really fucked up liberal consciousness among tech workers and the money tree is totally willing to shell out for that.
it was bad. it created a labor aristocracy who didn't understand their class interests; the whole project was based on making the Internet terrible with ads/casino psychology and exploiting more precarious workers, ruining whole categories of existing jobs; and every city that used to be worth living in was devastated by the influx of money into this useless group of workers. like this is a big part of why the rent is so damn high.
Elon Musk grossly over-estimated how much people would be willing to work at a company that's not about electric cars, scifi space travel, or honestly anything interesting despite terrible working conditions.
Just breathlessly repeating what the CEO says instead of doing 10 minutes of research to find all the other stories about how he accidentally fired a huge number of people who actually had a lot of value and now have to beg those workers to return.
Twitter was probably significantly overstaffed, like most big tech companies before the money printer shut off and they suddenly found they could get by on half the headcount. It is simultaneously true that he cut way too deep and without understanding what he was cutting.
Trust him, he's the expert in holding jobs where you don't do anything
