I'm all for the European don't work unpaid overtime, but what I don't get is the sense of entitlement these people had, when they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind. "WE WILL SHOW YOU ELON" - Show what exactly? That billing and other completely standard cookiecutter SaaS features can't be implemented by other engineers for what is ultimately a near real-time messaging platform with marketing hooks.
Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.
I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.
The pitfalls of extreme comfort. You have a place like the Bay Area with near perfect weather, obscene amounts of money, and at least until relatively recently, a social environment that lorded you as a "rockstar."
You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!"
Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explosive considering large chunks of the millennial generation were already coddled—and yes, I'm a millennial). You get a bunch of entitled brats who view anyone who isn't doing what they're doing as _less than_ (which is ironic considering those "less-thans" keep the bubble they live in running—electricity, food delivery, sewage systems, etc).
Pepper in the absolutely psychotic, cult-level diatribe these people sputter about "changing the world" and "making dents" and you have a low-level Jim Jones field jamboree brewing. It's absolutely zero surprise what's come out of SV over the last decade and change.
And that doesn't even factor in the pharmaceuticals!
It isn't an entitled attitude to refuse to work over the weekend under threat of losing your job to ship a new feature that isn't actually urgent at the whims of your new CEO who has spent the last few months publicly shitting all over you.
If you're being paid $300,000 it is. Some overtime expectation in reasonable or unforeseen situations is not unusual in many places. For blue collar and minimum wage service workers it can just be a way of life.
The idea that an employee doesn't think think they need to work overtime even though the company has just changed ownership, because they think they know better than the company owner what needs to be done, view his requests as "whims", and believe that because the owner had comments and opinions about the company that singled out no engineer or manager by name that they therefore should be allowed to disregard this direction, is one of the most entitled things I've ever heard. Doubly so if they were one of the ones who had spent the past few years personally shitting all over Musk publicly.
You're correct. I think that behavior is just the flip side of what I described above (instead of entitlement in favor of comfort, entitlement in favor of abusive behavior being shrugged off as "genius at work").
Both behaviors are ignorant and exist in an altered state of reality that's long-term destructive.
Maybe throw in a landmark forum, after you failed your first startup. I've actually seen people walk past hundreds of homeless people in the mission as if they don't exist, only to sit down in a flat in the middle of them to tell your tech buddy (me) that they're changing the world with the next photo sharing app. I had a little dystopia vibe, but then again I grew up in Europe so what do I know.
Oh Lordy…I had a boss send me to a “management seminar that he found exceptional” that turned out to be that train wreck around 20 years ago. I think I lasted maybe an hour before I got up and left in the middle of the session with the speaker yelling at me to sit down (and some rude asshole trying to block me from leaving…unsuccessfully).
I called my boss and told him I left, that I didn’t care if he got a refund, and to fire me if he wanted (he didn’t).
> they were threatening to leave in advance and then decided they'd rather just stay in their cushy jobs in the hopes that Musk would change his mind.
I imagine that at this point, many are staying until they get fired so they can collect severance pay.
That is what I would do. I absolutely would not work for Elon’s Twitter long term unless they paid me a king’s ransom, but I would definitely stick around and jump through the hoops just long enough to get a nice payout.
You’re almost there - which systemic problems in society are creating this elysium like class system where we jeer about the battles of the ascendant elite vs the shrinking bourgeois in a city where people beg for water on the street?
"Workers" is strange to me when talking about people who make 5-10x the national average (i.e. make more than many average executives in other industries). They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion. I'm fine with including staff in retail, restaurants etc, but someone making $500k+ a year doesn't fit into that category.
> They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion.
You are (understandably) conflating "worker" with "working class", but these are different contexts. A worker is anyone who must, well, work for a living as opposed to their income coming from property/capital.
Wouldn't you differentiate between workers and executives? Is the CEO a worker if he doesn't own the company?
Tying it to the salary makes sense to me. If you get paid minimum wage, asking you to work overtime without additional pay is unjust. You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
I am not making any argument here about whether this specific incident is fair or whatever. I'm just clarifying how the word "worker" is used in the context of economic and labour theory, and where your blue-collar misunderstanding likely came from.
Yes, I am a well-paid SWE. But I must still work for my salary; my income does not come from owning capital. That's the crucial difference.
> You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
Something on fire? Sure. Regulation means this project must be done Monday? Maybe, thought I'm wondering why management didn't start it sooner. A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
New CEO sets an arbitrary deadline for no reason other than to cull the heard? Fuck that.
Executives are different because of their compensation structure. When you're being paid via stock and option grants, money being used to pay "workers" is coming directly out of your pocket, so in this way executives are naturally a different class of employee.
"I'm going to _ask_ you to go ahead and come in on Saturday and I'm also going to _ask_ you to go ahead and come in on Sunday and I'm going to keep this stapler."
Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.
I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.