![]() They do it partly because they feel the work they do is valuable and the platform they help support is important. ![]() Still, Twitter employees keep coming into the office every day. “To know that is slowly crumbling every day, that people you know and work with and are friends with are no longer there, it’s worse than any prospective working an extra 20 hours or something like that.” The thought of even trying to take on all that work gives me nightmares.” Yet he’s less concerned about the workload as much as the decimation of the company culture. ![]() “I don’t know how I will be able to keep handling all the stuff they were doing to help build that project. “I was one of five, and the other four people working on it are gone,” he says. ![]() “With bread and butter issues like job security and caring for their families at stake, current and former employees are left anxious, cowed, and afraid-and unwilling to tell their stories.”ĭeMichiel says he was on a team of five people working on a technical project. This week Perez warned WIRED that the integrity of the US midterms was at risk because of Musk’s layoffs. “The amount of chaos and disarray after Elon Musk’s takeover, barely one week ago, is sad and disturbing,” says Eddie Perez, a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity, and former director of product management at Twitter. The looming threat of joining those that the company has already dispensed with has meant many current Twitter employees have kept their counsel about what life is like under the new CEO and his hangers-on. People will make mistakes they would not have made if they had been able to get a good night’s rest.” “It’s not sustainable,” the engineer says. Those issues are compounded by the fact that the staff tasked with making them are overworked, overstressed, and overtired. “Everything gets really complicated when you start pushing a lot of code very quickly after a week-plus of nothing,” he says, admitting to stability issues. “We’re doing some very hasty testing of things.” But each new, hasty change has an impact on performance and on how different parts of the platform interact. “There’s a lot of scrambling to make sure things are deployed and ready,” says the engineer. That partial success comes with its own risks. The update pushed to the Apple App Store on November 5, ahead of the deadline, though Crawford had to clarify that “the new Blue isn’t live yet.” Musk fired all but two of Twitter’s communications staffers, according to current and former staff that WIRED has spoken to-meaning public tweets by individual staff members are now de facto statements by the company. In one of the most iconic images of the last few weeks of chaos, Esther Crawford, whose team was charged with rolling out Musk’s plans for an update to Twitter Blue, was caught sleeping on the floor of Twitter’s offices to try and roll out the update ahead of a November 7 deadline-otherwise she and her team would reportedly be fired. Musk has been pressing to push out a raft of new updates for the site, threatening to terminate staff who don’t meet his targets. In the end, he received an email in his work inbox: He was safe.īut they’re only barely going. The engineer was 50-50 about what he thought would happen to him. People would look at their phones then let their immediate drinking buddies know their fate-then message others through backchannel methods to let them know. “We started getting messages trickling in,” the engineer says. Between drinks and conversation about their time at the company, tweeps (as the company calls its staff) kept refreshing their phones to learn whether they’d received emails in their work inboxes, suggesting they were safe, or their personal accounts, indicating they’d been let go. “It was a complicated evening,” says one Twitter engineer who avoided the axe, and who asked for anonymity to speak freely about the last week. A little after 5 pm PT on November 3, drinking spots around the company’s Market Street headquarters in San Francisco were teeming with staffers waiting to find out if they had survived the cull. When Twitter employees in San Francisco found out that their new boss, Elon Musk, was planning on laying off half the company, they headed to the nearest bar.
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