Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their "code is not satisfactory" following the recent code review.
Dozens of other devs got performance warnings in their inboxes.
How much do Twitter devs have to take?
I confirmed the above details with current Twitter software engineers and managers. Line managers were unaware of the performance warnings sent out.
This "performance warning" is a PIP that can result in firing.
As a reminder, devs went through all this before in 3 weeks:
Week 1: 50% of their colleagues were fired - and some of these people as well.
Week 2: Some of them were called back. RTO mandated: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-at-twitter/…
Week 3: all of them clicked “yes” to longer hours, all while the majority of devs resigned.
Week 4: now.
So, so cruel.
Those fired got 4 weeks severance, by the way. A slap in the face, given that if they chose to not click "yes" to stay just a week ago, they would have gotten 3 months.
They might have believed in Twitter 2.0, but still got a worse deal than those who chose to simply leave.
The performance warning email closes with this line:
"Please use this opportunity to restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team and company."
It should be Twitter 2.0 that needs to restore confidence with employees.
Happy Thanksgiving.
And can we stop looking up to Elon Musk for management inspiration? Yes, it's admirable how he built up businesses and wealth, and he is a visionary in many areas.
But we should not celebrate treating people unnecessarily cruel and creating a toxic working environment.
As per @Zoë Schiffer, the number of fired software engineers could be around 50.
These are 50 engineers who would have gotten an additional 2 months’ severance had they refused to commit to the “hardcore” Twitter.
Why give worse packages to those believing in “Twitter 2.0”?
One of the people fired Musk’s latest purge was Ikuhiro Ihara, a highly respected senior software engineer who helped lead the push to expand tweets to 280 characters.