I think you may have mis-read, or perhaps it was me. As I understand it Twitter's CISO, who is responsible for general data protection, resigned and the Irish bureaucrat responsible for overall EU GDPR compliance oversight has requested Twitter let him/her know their plans for maintaining compliance going forward.Originally Posted by jp1
Seems like a nothing-burger to me.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
You may be right. This is just stuff I've seen from various sites I follow for work. I will say though that GDPR is no joke. Ignoring it isn't likely to work out as well as ignoring an FTC consent decree would in the US. I suppose we'll learn in the coming days/weeks if their GDPR compliance is as "rock solid" as the failed rollout of pay for play "verified" accounts was. In the meantime if I see a cyber insurance submission for twitter in my inbox I will laugh as loudly as every other cyber insurance underwriter on the planet is likely to do before I politely send a quick declination to the broker.
And now we learn that all of payroll and most of finance quit yesterday, apparently taking the generous 3 month buyout musk offered. I assume pretty much the only people left at this point are people with H1-B visa issues making it difficult for them to find other work and people who are weak performers worried that they wouldn't be able to find a comparable job. Two weeks from now I expect we'll be hearing about how payroll didn't happen and those remaining people are pissed that they worked their asses off 14 hours/day for zero pay. This disaster is going to be an MBA school case study for years/decades to come.
All the best people think Twitter is dead, they keep saying so on Twitter. NPR had a podcast on Twitter being dead, and at the end asked listeners to follow them on....Twitter.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
So then I guess all the worst people think Twitter is doing great? It’ll be interesting to look back in a few month’s time and figure out if the best people or the worst people were right.
Oh, I don't know about that. I get the feeling new management felt it was bloated and too heavily influenced by particular ideologies and believed a good house cleaning and restructuring was in order. Maybe that will make it great, or maybe not, I don't know.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
A lot of the big tech firms have been laying off staff in the last couple of months. Thousands have been discovering that they weren’t as essential as they thought.
I think there’s a significant difference between doing a restructuring and what has happened at Twitter over the last few weeks. When one uses the word restructuring it implies some sort of organized, coherent decision making process. Shedding 2/3 of a company’s employees through a fairly random process that includes large scale layoffs and large scale quits seems to be more of a destructuring.
Does Twitter boast so much cachet that experienced coders who could work anywhere (literally) would willingly put up with Musk's abuse and outmoded work rules? He sounds like an absolute ass, and I would hope the employees who can will abandon ship with all due haste.
I understand there's an alternative called Mastodon (who comes up with these names?) in the works.
Well, I've bought tech companies in the past and supervised the merger/acquisition process.
Generally, you don't get rid of your top talent in the first week or so - often that talent is most of the reason you bought the company in the first place.
Certainly, issuing an ultimatum of "click YES to sign up for even-more-hardcore work under New Management, or click NOPE to take 3+ months' of severance and get out" produces, well, predictable results. There's probably a Dilbert cartoon about it. All the good people take the bailout, all the people you want to get rid of stay, further dragging down the company. (Anyone remember when MIPS Computer offered a voluntary severance package when they were trying to "rightsize" after a takeover? Sun, Dec, Intel, AMD, and other companies had all of the good engineering, sales, and marketing folks in their pockets within a week, MIPS was left with, well, people who didn't know how to turn the lights on...)
Elon's sorta-insane email he sent yesterday demanding that anyone left who still had a clue about the Twitter technology show up at 2PM at corporate HQ, and to bring code samples for his inspection, seems to have produced remarkably poor attendance. Little birdies tell me that entire groups simply left. One group that I know of there had ~95% of its engineers leave. I wonder if anyone left knows how anything works at this point.
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