Elon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that all employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of the San Francisco office by early afternoon, according to multiple reports.
The billionaire said in a follow-up email: ‘If possible, I would appreciate it if you could travel to SF to attend in person,’ adding that he would be at the company’s headquarters until midnight and return on Saturday. morning, Reuters reported.
He said the engineers should report at 2 p.m. Friday.
The emails came a day after reports said between 1,000 and 1,200 Twitter employees decided to quit the beleaguered social media company after a Thursday deadline by Musk for staffers to sign up. for “long hours at high intensity”, or leave. The New York Times also reported on the employee emails and decisions.
Twitter-style, dozens of employees tweeted their resignations along with a version of the company’s internal slogan #lovewhereyouworked. “I may be #exceptional, but damn it, I’m just not #hardcore,” tweeted Andrea Horst, who worked in supply chain and capacity management at Twitter.
The company had told employees it would close its offices and cut off access to badges until Monday, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed sources, and it was not immediately clear if the head office had reopened.
Musk ordered employees to email him a summary of what their software code had “achieved” over the past six months, “along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.” .
“There will be short tech talks that will give me a better understanding of Twitter’s tech stack,” Musk wrote in one of the emails.
Musk said this week that some Tesla engineers help evaluate Twitter’s engineering teams, but he said it was on a “voluntary basis” and “after hours.”
The loss of employees in critical engineering roles comes just days before the World Cup, when the service is generally expecting an increase in traffic. The high-traffic event could be a big test for the new Twitter 2.0, as Musk has called it, and how the company expects to operate with a smaller workforce.
Musk said he would try to speak with remote employees via video and only people who couldn’t physically make it to company headquarters or had a family emergency would be excused.
In his first email to Twitter employees this month, Musk said, “We’re also changing Twitter’s policy so that remote work is no longer permitted, unless there are specific exceptions.”
“The managers will send me the exception lists for review and approval.”
The remote work policy prompted a proposed class action lawsuit by Dmitry Borodaenko, a Twitter employee who said he was fired for not showing up to the office. Borodaenko, who has a disability that leaves him vulnerable to Covid-19, alleges that the remote work policy as well as the requirement to work long and intense hours violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the complaint.
Musk’s first three weeks as owner of Twitter have been marked by rapid change and chaos. He quickly fired the former Twitter CEO and other top executives, then fired half of his staff earlier this month.
Yoel Roth, the former trust and safety chief who was brought in to assuage advertisers’ concerns about the platform, said in a New York Times op-ed that he chose to resign last week because it was clear that Musk would unilaterally make the decision. . “A Twitter whose policies are set by unilateral executive order hardly needs a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” Roth wrote.
Musk wrote on Twitter Thursday night that he wasn’t worried about resignations because “the best people stay.”
“So where does Twitter go from here?” Roth wrote. “Some of the company’s decisions in the coming weeks and months, such as the virtual certainty of allowing Donald Trump’s account to return to the service, will have an immediate and noticeable impact. But to really understand the shape of Twitter moving forward, I encourage you to watch not just the choices the company makes, but how Mr. Musk makes them.
