“It’s a pressure cooker”: in the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter

Twitter is literally a shell of itself. A company that once had more than 8,000 employees has dwindled to fewer than 2,000. And those who remain will have to do more than just adjust to the “tough” work environment enigmatic entrepreneur Elon Musk demanded of his employees in the infamous email in a letter shortly after taking office: “The infrastructure team works the least hours of 11-12 hours a week. . a day just to keep the platform online.

Not that it worked all that well: it’s been a hot couple of weeks for Twitter, with a change in the computer code that keeps the app running that resulted in images not loading and links not going anywhere last week. Cause? An overworked, under-motivated, lone engineer was challenged to make changes without peer supervision. When something went wrong, the remaining staff had to rush to fix the situation.

It was emblematic of the problems Twitter is facing. Employees are expected to make an unrealistic amount of changes to key platform features in a short period of time, without the support of colleagues who were on the platform just a few months ago. Do it wrong and risk incurring the wrath of your boss, who this week volunteered to attack a disabled employee in front of his 118 million followers.

“It’s a pressure cooker,” says the remaining employee, who requested anonymity. “There are no guidelines. There is no respect. There is absolutely no transparency. It’s horrible.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment via its press office, which may no longer exist.

Nobody knows who’s next for the pork chop. Recently, managers were told to make a list of people who need to be promoted, says a former employee who still communicates with those who continue to work. Little did they know they were signing their own death warrant: many of these managers were subsequently fired and replaced by those they recommended as part of a cost-cutting campaign.

This morale, already below zero, has fallen. “A big part of how we think about our work is being proud of the work we do and where we work,” said Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s former vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa. who acquired the company prior to Musk’s acquisition. . “The more Musk acts like a local drunk — swearing at former disabled employees — the fewer current employees will be proud to say that they work there.”

For those who hang on, many of whom do so because their right to work in the country is tied directly to their permanent job at Twitter, the future looks bleak. They receive conflicting advice and guidance based on Musk’s ever-changing whims. Some have been told that key data centers or offices are being taken offline or closed to save money and have done groundwork for this, only to be instructed to reverse the decision when their owner panicked due to another site going down.

Whether the platform stays online at all is partly independent of Twitter: it reportedly owes Amazon $70 million for cloud hosting services that it hasn’t paid for yet. Amazon has historically used its own Twitter ad spend as a bargaining chip to ensure the company pays its bills. But this may change.

The idea of ​​employee advancement was gone: mentoring programs suffered from the reality of meeting Musk’s ever-changing demands. The current employee says there are no mentor meetings because employees have been told that Musk sees no point in doing so and would rather take the time to implement his change requests.

With a mixture of envy and fear, today’s workers are watching the fate of the dismissed former colleagues. A former employee is being stalked via a credit card issuer’s phone app by American Express, which provided its corporate credit card to Twitter to pay off thousands of dollars in unpaid debt.

The employee, like many others, raised it along with other Twitter employees who cannot authorize payment of the amount owed because it requires approval from the former employee’s manager.

This person also no longer works on Twitter: she became the latest victim of Musk.

Those who work there are also less and less true employees of Twitter. Employees of the social media platform grumble that they are being asked to follow the orders of employees recruited into the ranks of Twitter by Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s other companies. “This is a disaster,” says a former employee. “It looks like the owner is just assigning people to positions in the hope that they will work.” Another called newcomers to Musk’s other companies “unaware” of the launch of the social media platform.

The conversations of techies on social media assessing the company and its culture leave little hope for the future of the platform. The site’s one-star review states: “The new management is VERY bad at communicating, both inside and out.” Instability. An immature boy boss and he runs a doomed company.

What little we can glean about Twitter — its frequent crashes, lags, bugs, and a valuable snippet shared publicly by its owner — suggests things are going in the wrong direction. Twitter lost 40 percent of its revenue in December 2022 compared to the previous year, investors had to sheepishly admit.

“It’s a bit like a cartoon character who runs off a cliff, but doesn’t fall right off,” Daisley says. “Initially, many commentators were ready to say that the Twitter business is full of slackers, that Elon fired 75 percent of his employees and that he is still going on. Well, Wile E. Coyote looked down and found that gravity applied to him as well.