Surely no organisation could survive the termination of the entire “human rights” department, the abrupt demand that everyone return to the office, or the insistence that staff be “hardcore” or else get out of the way? If it didn’t crash, every company in the world would have to re-examine its staffing.
That is it, indeed. A company run the way the woke and progressive left would have all of society run does in fact become a problem if it is more successful when it is not run as the woke and progressive left believe all of society should be run.
Which is, of course, why vested interests are determined that it will crash. And if reality once again refuses to oblige, they will simply pretend it crashed.
After all, pretending black is white is what they do now.
It used to be the complint that companies would be taken ovet by the accountants. Their interest was only in that year’s bottom line and that is why do many established firms started to struggle because they no longer planned for the future.
Now theu appear to be run by HR departments and firms struggle because they are preparing for the wrong future…
Sure, but the only thing worse than a company run by accountants is a company run by woke bureaucrats, since they have neither the financial sense to run within a budget, nor the commercial sense to understand that if you’re underwater financially (as Twitter was), with no hope of turning an operating profit then you need to increase sales or cut costs, neither of which seemed possible under the old Twitter.
Along comes Elon Musk and all of a sudden there are no more sacred cows and those not contributing to either increasing (or even just halting the decline) in sales or technology was offered, essentially 3-months severance.
Many Twitter employees, seeing the writing on the wall, with only the likelihood of increased workloads under a management philosophy that they despised, took the money and ran, something like 75-80% of the staff just walked out the door.
Now, sure there are costs and there are costs, but continuing to be able to operate with only 20% of the staff is a going to generate considerable savings, especially if you can offload the office space quickly (which seems to be a sticking point for Twitter).
Despite advertising revenues having fallen, the costs seem to have fallen faster, so operating profitability looks possible in a relatively short period of time.
Bring in a CEO who can avoid being held hostage to the Twiterati leftists while focussing sales and marketing teams to recover advertising revenue and you’ve got a potential money spinner.
Everybody wins. Who wouldn’t want that?
Oh, yeah. Well, phuq ’em, especially if they ain’t PAYING customers, advertisers or shareholders. Welcome to Capitalism.
Now they appear to be run by HR departments and firms struggle because HR departments are staffed by morons.
FTFY Otto….
In tech the HR problem is even worse because they call themselves things like ‘talent management’…
The cost of real estate is minimal compared with the cost of staff. How much real estate will trouble Twitter depends on how savvy its initial arrangements were. IIRC WeWork cunningly used a different SPV for every lease…
It’s not even just woke. I saw someone complaining about work on his Android UI framework would have to end. Doing some work on a tool that other developers use, and then open sourcing it. To non-techies, this is like a cab company spending money on designing cars rather than just buying them. And yeah, these people will always talk like doing this makes the company money but that’s the pitch, and it’s bullshit. The developer just wants to do this thing because it’s fun and cool.
I think, more broadly, they had a serious principle-agent problem. There are people who want to be diversity advocates, and if they can find a way to get a Twitter-level wage to do it, they will. The people in charge believed the evidence-free claim about the importance of more diversity. Most of them were bureaucrats or idiots, not entrepreneurs like Musk. People like Musk and Steve Jobs keep all this stuff out. They’re focussed on delivery, not vague claims.
On paper the Twitter changes seem rational: get rid of the blue-haired lefties, fire low-productivity workers. But in practice every large company has a phalanx of HR people and pays at least lip-service to Diversity / Inclusion / Equity; and every company has been toying with varying degrees of work-from-home.
I think Elon was right about Twitter’s specific problems; but it’s not clear how much those lessons can be applied to other companies in other industries. The most obvious problem is that there aren’t enough “hardcore” staff to go round.
MC,
“In tech the HR problem is even worse because they call themselves things like ‘talent management’…”
Not only are they bullshit factories, they get in the way of hiring. Power skirts who are steeped in bollocks like Myers-Briggs and psychometric testing who think they are helping, so they wedge themselves between managers and developers. One large company I know struggled to hire contractors because the HR process was so long. So, they’d bring in a dev for an interview, but by the time the agency got the nod, the contractor was gone.
The best HR is lower middle class or working class women, with names like Doreen and Sandra who do the payroll, the formalities of leaving and joining, can suggest good agencies to use, and if you get into a disciplinary situation, you get them involved. They have nothing to do with who you hire into a team, which is right as they know nothing about the skills.
“Now they appear to be run by HR departments and firms struggle because HR departments are staffed by Karens”
Fixed it for you.
The interesting part is like to know is how they convinced corporate CEOs to spend money on this bullshit. Especially the older, more seasoned ones. A lot of them knew it was a bad investment, so were they simply threatened with frivolous lawsuits? Bribed? I see a Netflix documentary on the horizon.
I don’t know what Yanks mean by “hardcore”. Do even they know?
The only thing worse for the old blue checks and self appointed woke leaders than losing control of Twitter would be Musk making it profitable.
Watching their reaction when he allowed Allowing anyone to become a blue check has been fun as well.