Despite prophecies of its pending demise, Twitter is still standing—and that’s a concern for workers still relishing the brief period of employee empowerment that stemmed from the Great Resignation.
When Elon Musk cut at least two-thirds of the company's workforce after taking over, critics predicted the microblogging site would face system-wide outages, with events like the FIFA World Cup in Qatar overloading the platform to the point of collapse.
Instead, it appears Twitter’s pre-buyout staff of 7,500 people included plenty of non-essential personnel—and their abrupt and often involuntary departures in the name of Musk's radical turnaround has the business elite swooning.
“If it works, for all those working at Google and Facebook, watch this space,” wrote Alan Sugar, a rags-to-riches tycoon and billionaire star of the U.K.’s facsimile of The Apprentice. “You might be next.”
Gutting Twitter's staff without any perceptible decline in user experience reinforces a common thought among many managers: one exceptional worker willing to go the extra mile is worth more to the organization than dozens of average ones. A bonus lesson for managers eager to trim? Internal troublemakers caught disparaging Musk either publicly on Twitter or privately on Slack have also been terminated without a noticeable drop in quality.
With the Federal Reserve willing to risk recession to cool down inflation, companies could now be tempted to follow suit and weed through their bloated headcounts to cut costs, protect profits and eliminate problematic staff while at it.
Axios estimated over 120,000 tech workers have already been laid off this year, eclipsing the total from all of the pandemic year 2020.
“Watching Elon Musk and Co. take over Twitter is like watching a business school case study on how to make money on the Internet,” opined Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, a publication dedicated to serving “high-powered tech executives” and entrepreneurs.
A key lesson in her view: “Cut costs dramatically and do it fast and all at once to get it over with.”
Return of the rat race follows the Great Resignation
Musk didn’t just stop at eliminating vast swathes of the workforce, though. He’s demanded an end to working from home and instituted a strict regimen of micromanagement all the way down to mandating software developers submit their code weekly for his perusal.
He even installed beds so employees crunching to meet his ambitious deadlines don’t need to concern themselves with returning home to see their loved ones, feed their pets or water their plants.
The former head of global public policy at Facebook, Chris Kelly, called it a “chainsaw” approach, but it appears to be catching on.
Wow if we believe the news @elonmusk is firing half the work force of @twitter. Maybe they were hidden in the wood work or working from home and had an easy ride. It's brave decision.If it works,for all those working at Google, and Facebook watch this space. You might be next
— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) November 5, 2022
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has recently decided his employees will be expected to spend at least 80% of their time in the office. On a normal five-day week that means working remotely might only be possible on Friday.
Marc Benioff, founder of business software vendor Salesforce, sent staff an email this month asking whether new employees hired during the pandemic were less productive because they worked remotely: "Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?" The company also recently terminated a pandemic-era benefit that allowed for one Friday off every month.
It wasn’t too long ago workers were considered heroes for clocking into work daily to stock shelves with vital staples during the pandemic. During the 2021 economic boom that followed, employees were briefly able to wrestle back a modicum of control over their office lives thanks in part to the massive skills shortage that prompted the Great Resignation.
A recession could tip the balance of power back to employers, allowing bosses to exploit their staff’s dependence on a salary during a pending economic downturn, according to Jack Altman, CEO of people management software platform Lattice. Musk has become their poster boy for a return to the pre-pandemic norms of the rat race.
"Emboldened by the new employment power dynamics, more companies will start asking people to come into the office more often, under their assumption that in person leads to harder work, better collaboration, and easier understanding of outputs," Altman noted.
In an interview with Fortune, Nuuwork founder Shannon Manson advocated employees diversify their income through contract work to take back control from bullying bosses like Musk. “People are realizing that no one is going to care about your life as much as you,” said the CEO of the e-learning platform. “We shouldn’t have to work at jobs where bosses take advantage of us such that we want to quietly quit.”
...but Musk's template for success cannot easily be duplicated
Yet labor market experts like employment attorney Peter Rahbar have a clear message for those executives contemplating adopting the Tesla boss's draconian approach: You’re no Elon Musk.
Love him or hate him, the serial entrepreneur has proven successful in aligning the aspirations of his workforce with his own. Now he enjoys a following so strong that there will likely always be a group of devoted fans willing to join his companies no matter the tactics to which he resorts. This means his example is too unique to serve as a template for success.
One fundamental driver is that the employment dynamic has swung over the past few years from balanced, to strongly employee-centric, and now back towards companies.
— Jack Altman (@jaltma) December 16, 2022
“If a company wants to follow Elon Musk’s approach for having no regard whatsoever for its employees, you’re bound for disaster, because employees don’t want to work for those people and in this market they don’t have to,” Rahbar, who runs his own boutique law firm in New York, told Fortune. He believes there are still open positions that were never filled during the pandemic and that the war for talent continues.
Thanks to all the information at their fingertips on everything from salary to benefits—provided by the Internet, social media and employer review services like Glassdoor—workers are in a better position than ever to choose where they want to work, how much they want to work and above all for whom they want to work.
“The majority of executives are not going to risk the future of their companies, their investors, their customers and their advertisers doing things that Elon Musk does, because they are not Elon Musk,” Rahbar said. “And they don’t have to, frankly, nor should they—it’s not smart business.”
No good omen when HR professionals avoid your company
Lorrie Lykins has been studying governance issues in her role as vice president of research at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), and she believes directors must care deeply about the wellbeing of its workforce.
Musk’s decision to fire expecting mothers and eliminate employee resource groups—such as Twitter’s Blackbirds, which represented the interests of its African-American staff—only undermines a company’s culture.
“It’s just chaos and destruction right now, and I think they will continue to bleed talent,” she told Fortune.
Watching @elonmusk + Co take over Twitter is like watching a business school case study on how to make money on the internet. Amazing that at some level it is so basic. Lesson one: charge your power users what they are willing to pay. 1/3
— Jessica Lessin (@Jessicalessin) October 31, 2022
In a November survey of over 500 human resources professionals—in other words, those most familiar with prevailing job market trends—she found that 73% of respondents would not accept an HR job at Twitter.
Moreover, when asked what they would do if they were already working there, 42% agreed with the statement they’d be furiously sending out their resume. Another 17% simply disagreed with the very premise of the scenario, checking the box "I’d have already quit."
Lykins pointed to the damning example of chief HR officer Kathleen Pacini, who resigned last month. “It’s a real statement when those in the C-Suite at Twitter that remained after the firings then leave voluntarily,” she said.
Because younger workers grew up with the experience of multiple booms and busts—first from the global financial crisis and then COVID—they are also predicted to be the first generations to suffer a lower standard of living than their parents.
Because of this, they are less likely to believe in the supposed virtues of the economic system they inherited, and prefer to work for those who share their values, including sustainability, mental and physical health and a better work-life balance.
“There are certain changes that occurred during the pandemic that may wane a little bit but won't go away. Especially when talking to millennial and Gen Z workers, they are not down with commuting to an office just to sit at a desk in a cubicle for 40 hours a week,” said Lykins.
Labor market still robust
For that reason, Musk may struggle to recruit if he acts as though the appeal of working backbreaking hours so his $44 billion Twitter investment doesn't go belly up is comparable to joining his SpaceX company to build rockets to Mars or help Tesla develop humanoid robots that might one day revolutionize our everyday lives.
“I don’t see millions of people trying to come to Twitter in the same way they did for Tesla,” said Nuuwork’s Monson, referring to the 3 million applications Tesla received last year. “I don’t believe the new regime aligns well with the kind of people that want to work in media.”
Not all executives celebrate Musk’s “extreme hardcore” restructuring of Twitter as a blueprint for success, either.
Amanda Richardson of CoderPad, a technical assessment platform that aims to add transparency and fairness to the tech hiring practice, posted an open letter on LinkedIn to all the Twitter employees: please reach out for a job—from their living rooms, because that’s where all her staff work too.
“I don’t believe great work comes from things like printing out code at the end of the week, the number of hours spent in the office, or how many butts are on seats or heads on beds,” the CEO told Fortune.
In her experience, it is efficiency that counts, not a soul-crushing regimen she likened to China’s 996 culture where people work from nine in the morning to nine at night six days a week.
“Some of the best outcomes I’ve seen come from very little work,” says Richardson.
So the next time your boss has delusions of being the next Musk, employees should remember they are not alone. In a job market where the unemployment rate remains at historically low levels, there will always be other companies like CoderPad on the lookout for skilled workers.
