Twitter is struggling to retain workers after new Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk demanded that employees should sign a pledge to work ‘long hours at high intensity’.
Hundreds of employees were reported to have rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to keep working for the business.
RIPTwitter, #TwitterDown, Mastodon and Myspace were all trending on the platform after the deadline passed on Musk’s ultimatum for the remaining workforce to sign up for “long hours at high intensity”.
The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages, raising questions about the stability of the platform amid the loss of employees and prompting hurried debates among managers over who should be asked to return, current and former employees said.
In an early sign that the number of those declining to sign was greater than anticipated, Musk eased off a return-to-office mandate he had issued a week ago, telling employees on Thursday they would be allowed to work remotely if their managers asserted they were making “an excellent contribution”.
Twitter later announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badge access until Monday, the New York Times reported.
According to Zoe Schiffer, a journalist for the tech industry newsletter Platformer, the new developments were confirmed by Twitter management who also told employees on Thursday that offices were temporarily closed and inaccessible.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in the ultimatum, an internal memo sent Wednesday and seen by AFP.
“This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” he added.
Staff had been asked to follow a link to affirm their commitment to “the new Twitter” by 5:00 pm New York time (2200 GMT) on Thursday.
“I may be #exceptional, but gosh darn it, I’m just not #hardcore,” tweeted one former employee, Andrea Horst, whose LinkedIn profile still reads “Supply Chain & Capacity Management (Survivor) @Twitter.”
She added the hashtag “#lovewhereyouworked,” as did many other employees announcing their choice.
Musk, also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has come under fire for radical changes at the social media company, which he bought for $44 billion late last month.
He had already fired half of the company’s 7,500 staff, scrapped a work-from-home policy and imposed long hours, all while his attempts to overhaul Twitter have faced chaos and delays.
Earlier, Musk was meeting some top employees to try to convince them to stay, said one current employee and a recently departed employee who was in touch with Twitter colleagues.
In a private chat on Signal with about 50 Twitter staffers, nearly 40 said they had decided to leave, according to the former employee.
And in a private Slack group for Twitter’s current and former employees, about 360 people joined a new channel titled “voluntary-layoff”, said a person with knowledge of the Slack group.
A separate poll on Blind asked staffers to estimate what percentage of people would leave Twitter based on their perception. More than half of respondents estimated at least 50% of employees would leave.
While it is unclear how many employees have chosen to stay, the numbers highlight the reluctance of some staffers to remain at a company where Musk has hastened to fire half its employees including top management, and is ruthlessly changing the culture to emphasize long hours and an intense pace.
AFP