Thread Reader
Gergely Orosz

Gergely Orosz
@GergelyOrosz

Nov 24, 2022
10 tweets
Tweet

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: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes- 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.
One of the impacted software engineers. No reasoning. No warning. Just firing. Connect with Yiwei here if you can help him find a software engineering position: linkedin.com/posts/yiwei-zh
Screenshot from a LinkedIn update from Yiwei Zhuang saying:

“My employment is terminated immediately with no reason today by Elon's Twitter 2.0 team before Thanksgiving. Many employees are fired today as well including those who are on parental leave. 
I have 4-year working experience in backend and distributed services in live streaming services using Golang/AWS and Ads recommendation system/Machine learning infra using Java. 
I am on an H1B visa and have only 60 days to start a new job. I am looking for a Software/Machine Learning Engineer role immediately. Please feel free to comment below or message me on LinkedIn and email me at yiweizhuangcmu@gmail.com 
#opentowork #layoffs”
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”?
Zoë Schiffer

Zoë Schiffer
@ZoeSchiffer

Hearing that roughly 50 Twitter engineers were abruptly fired last night and dozens more received warnings:
Read more about what happened, and my overview of how and - possibly, why - Twitter has become the most toxic workplace amongst any major tech company in 2022: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/twitter-cruel-
Oh wow: the person who fought for, and made 280 characters happen, fired over a single code review. What a shame. What a loss - for Twitter.
Casey Newton

Casey Newton
@CaseyNewton

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.
Gergely Orosz

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz
Writing @Pragmatic_Eng & @EngGuidebook. Advisor @mobile__dev. Uber & Skype alumni. Career opportunities for software engineers & EMs: https://t.co/MJ0eAtlaS1
Follow on 𝕏
Missing some tweets in this thread? Or failed to load images or videos? You can try to .