Today Ten days have passed since the process of mass dismissals began on Twitter. Things looked bad from the start and, as we learned over the weekend, what took place was a real bloodletting, with entire departments being laid off en masse, in some cases so arbitrarily that, a few hours later , the social network was forced to contact part of those laid off (dozens of them, according to sources) to ask them to return to work.
With its workforce drastically reduced in just one weekend, It seemed that this crude part of Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter was overand that the time had come to focus on business plans to try to improve the monetization of the social network, which is what truly worries the billionaire who, I have no proof but no doubts either, must be regretting more and more of the bravado every day to say that he wanted to buy Twitter.
And I say that it seemed that that part so raw was over, but it turns out that it was not. And it is that this weekend, more specifically yesterday, Sunday, Twitter would have carried out a second mass of layoffs. A process that, according to Casey Newton fonts, would have ended with no less than 80% of external workers, that is, subcontracted by the social network through service companies and the like. Until now, the number of subcontracted employees was around 5,500, but the dismissals would have affected around 4,400.
Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.
People inside are stunned.
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 13, 2022
The fact that they were subcontracted workers should not make us think that they were not part of the Twitter workforce, quite the contrary, worked in departments such as content moderation (precisely the only one capable of appeasing the uncertainty of advertisers) and marketing, among others. Like those hired directly by Twitter, they had access to the corporate Slack and participated in the day-to-day work of the social network like the others.
And I say that they had access to Slack, also in the past, because once again the forms have been conspicuous by their absence, so that many of these workers have found out that Twitter had decided to dispense with their services precisely by trying to access this tool of internal communications, only to discover that his access to it had been revoked. Others, as is often caricatured, found out “through the press” and they confirmed it by trying to access Slack.
An evil that is said to be endemic in large technology companies is that of oversized templates, as a technique to retain talent and thus prevent it from spilling over to other companies (competitors, you know what I mean). Twitter surely also limped on that foot until days ago, but from then on, and even with the need to clean up the accounts, the total volume of workers fired from Twitter is far, far above what is reasonable. And yes, I repeat that Elon Musk needs to be accounted for, but selling all four wheels to pay for gas has never been the brightest idea.
