After new owner Elon Musk offered them the option to commit to “hardcore” work or resign with severance money on Thursday, Twitter’s engineering team and other employees continued to leave the company.
Some others announced on Twitter that they were quitting after Musk’s deadline for making the commitment. According to a worker fired earlier this week who spoke anonymously out of concern for retaliation, several employees used a private forum other than the company’s message board to discuss their impending departure, asking questions about how it might jeopardize their U.S. visas or if they would receive the promised severance pay.
Although it’s unclear how many of Twitter’s already-depleted staff members chose to accept Musk’s offer, the most recent round of departures shows that the site is still losing staff members as it prepares for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. One of the busiest occasions on Twitter, this, if things go wrong, may render its services unusable.
“Thank you for being such great teammates through the ups and downs, Tweeps who have chosen to make today their last day. I’m excited to see what you do after this “Esther Crawford, a former employee who is still with the business, tweeted that she has been working on updating the platform’s authentication mechanism.
Musk has fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 full-time employees since he took over the firm less than three weeks ago, in addition to an unknown number of contractors who were in charge of content moderation and other essential tasks. On his first day as Twitter’s owner, he sacked key executives; others departed on their own accord later. He started firing a select number of employees earlier this week for criticizing him in public or on the business’ private Slack messaging platform.
Then, overnight on Wednesday, Musk sent an email to Twitter’s remaining employees explaining that the company is fundamentally a software and server company and requesting that they decide by Thursday evening whether they want to stay with the company.
To create “a breakthrough Twitter 2.0,” Musk wrote, employees “will need to be extremely hardcore,” and success will require working long hours with high intensity.
Musk, though, changed his mind about requiring that everyone work from the office in an email sent on Thursday. Many of the survivors of the layoffs were offended by his early rejection of remote work.
In an email to staff, he softened his earlier tone; saying that “your manager must take responsibility for ensuring you are making a great contribution” is all that is needed for approval. Along with this, employees would be required to hold “in-person meetings with your colleagues on a regular cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month.”
“RIPTwitter” was the most popular trending topic in the United States as of 7 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by “Tumblr,” “Mastodon,” and “MySpace.”
An inquiry for comment received from Twitter was not answered.
