While 3,738 Twitter employees they prepare – according to rumors – to leave the company through the main door, cut off by the new owner Elon Musk and from his circle of consultants, one special team of over 50 engineers he’d be ready to sneak into the San Francisco headquarters through the back door, possibly away from the photographers’ flashes.
The reason is clear. The new developers are actually an old acquaintance of Musk: most of them work for Tesla, the automaker that produces electric supercars. Two engineers are instead borrowed from The Boring Company, the company that digs tunnels to solve the traffic problem of large cities. One instead comes from Neuralinkwhich develops implantable neural interfaces. All three companies are owned by Elon Musk.
This is what they claim Cnbc e Bloombergwhich report other details of the operation: Tesla’s engineers would have been selected, in large part, from the area that deals with developing the software for autonomous driving. Their job would be to contribute to Twitter code reviewto identify problems and any bugs.
It is curious that the special team called to solve the problems of Twitter has not yet managed to write the software that will get Tesla out of trouble. In fact, a heavy task has been incumbent on the engineers selected by Musk for some time: making Tesla’s autonomous driving system – called Full Self-Driving – truly autonomous. In summary, Tesla is selling a deceptive software update for $ 15,000 because, the US authorities say, the cars on which it is installed still require human intervention.
As if that weren’t enough, some Twitter-shifted Tesla engineers told reporters – confidentially – that their skills in car software development they are not suitable for programming the elements that characterize a social network.
But Musk wants to change Twitter at any cost. And he wants to do it now, with all the resources he has at his disposal. Employees of the social network have already been asked to prepare for work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. “Otherwise your job is at risk” they heard the managers of the company say.
The results are there for all to see. Evan Jones, product manager at Twitter, posted a photo of a colleague sleeping in the officeon the floor, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Her name is Esther Crawford, she is part of the early stage products team and commented on the image: “When your team presses for deadlines it can happen that you sleep in the workplace.”
“I work with incredibly talented and ambitious people and this is not a normal time. We are less than a week away from a massive commercial and cultural transaction – Crawford added -. Doing difficult things takes sacrifice, time and energy. I have colleagues all over the world who are working hard to bring something new to life, so it’s important for me to be there, for them, and to keep the team up and running ”.
Esther Crawford also adds a hashtag, #LoveWhereYouWork. The of him, at the moment, it’s not a sentiment running through the Twitter offices. At the end of last October, in the days when Musk was about to complete the acquisition of the social network, a draft of a letter from Twitter employees addressed to Musk and the old board of directors circulated. The document asked, among other things, “a decent working condition” and the promise to preserve the agreements already stipulated with the company, including “remote work”.
By relying on Tesla engineers, the entrepreneur is on the safe side. We are talking about employees accustomed to the pace that the entrepreneur demands, to his pressures, to his sometimes extreme idea of work. In the documentary “The Elon Musk Show”that the Bbc has just broadcast in England, the former collaborators of the entrepreneur say they saw him red in the face, out of anger, when entering the office at 9 in the evening he could not find anyone at work.
The claims of the richest man in the world are very high. It could not be otherwise for a man who claims to work “16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 52 weeks a year”. “And people still say I’m lucky,” the entrepreneur adds each time.
To Twitter employees, Musk hinted that smart working – granted “forever” by the previous managing director Parag Agrawal – will no longer be allowed.
Tesla employees, on the other hand, have already metabolized the obligation to be present: with an email sent last June, Musk announced that remote workauthorized in the darkest period of the pandemic, “is no longer accepted”.
In short, by pulling the same blanket a bit, Musk intends to revive the fortunes of Twitter saving on personnel costs.
Musk’s organization charts already feature gods full-time joint employees. For instance Charlie Kuehmannwho serves as President of Materials at Tesla, is also a vice president of SpaceX. On the other hand, when an employee of one company is temporarily moved to another, they generally get paid extra for consulting.
But sometimes it happens that these emergency ‘interventions’, like the one designed for Twitter, are unpaid. Employees are put in a position to accept, because overtime, under Musk, is presented as a career advancement opportunity.