After a tweet exchange where Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned a fired former Twitter executive's disabilities and work performance, Musk has issued a rare apology and offered to rehire former Senior Director of Product Design Haraldur "Halli" Thorleifsson.
Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021, saying on the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that he decided to let his successful design agency Ueno get acquired by Twitter because he really believed that, much like Musk, Twitter had "never lived up to its potential." Until his exit from Twitter, Thorleifsson led an innovation team at Twitter, but Musk apparently was not familiar with the meaningful contributions Thorleifsson made to the company until after he let Thorleifsson go. Now Musk apparently regrets dismissing Thorleifsson.
[...] Before Thorleifsson got the official notification that he'd been fired from Twitter, he told the BBC that he had a theory explaining why it took Twitter nine days to respond to his inquiries about layoffs.
"My theory is they made a mistake and are now looking for anything they can find to make this a 'for cause' firing to avoid having to fulfill their contractual obligations," Thorleifsson told the BBC.
According to The New York Times, the cost of firing Thorleifsson may be greater to Twitter than the cost of keeping him on, which could be another factor motivating Musk's decision to try to rehire the former design executive. Twitter users have speculated that his severance package could be worth $100 million, and Thorleifsson seems willing to take the money and leave. He tweeted that he's OK with his exit from Twitter and asked Musk to confirm he'll receive his full severance.
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Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?
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During the pandemic, Big Tech was booming and hiring new employees as fast as they could. With all that hubbub behind us, and an uncertain economic outlook, those Giants of the Internet are cautiously trimming some of that fat in preparation for leaner times.
That, at least, is the argument for the recent wave of lay-offs at Facebook (Meta), Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, SalesForce, Lyft, DoorDash and Carvana. It seems, though, that the recent layoffs at Google might have been a little different.
Instead of culling the recent hires, the trusted hands at open source teams, and those teams themselves, are being hit especially hard argues an opinion piece at El Reg. Chris DiBona, founder of Google's Open Source Program Office, Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and Google engineer, Cat Allman, former Program Manager for Developer EcoSystems, and Dave Lester, Head of Google's open source security initiatives, are the main names being mentioned.
El Reg's observation might be a coincidence, however; and the way the layoffs are being executed kinda points to that. No exit interviews, but just people's access badges disabled, and firings by e-mail: at least one engineer got the message in the middle of his production shift. Which gave rise to an interesting speculation by former Google engineer Mike Knell:
Best theory I have is that an outside company was hired and given a "clean room" export from the HR systems to work with.
Stripped of identifying information and any demographic data that could incur a *direct* disciminatory bias in the results. They were then told to write code to determine which rows to cut from the dataset based on the output of some weighted formula designed to determine the "fireability" of that employee while maximising the savings achieved by the exercise. They then took the output of that algorithm, stack ranked the results (because Google just LOVES to stack rank things, especially people) and returned the top 12,000 employee IDs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Revek on Saturday March 11, @05:59PM (1 child)
Guy has a golden parachute and now a potential privacy lawsuit. I don't know whether US law or Icelandic law would apply?
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday March 12, @10:44PM
Any damages he has to pay is to his bank account like you buying a draft beer in a dive bar is to yours.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @06:56PM (8 children)
Winning on the upside and the downside. Yay, give this guys some clicks guys.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @07:12PM (7 children)
No-one's forcing you to read it, much less waste time with your negative and useless comment.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @08:33PM (6 children)
Well some of y'all aren't getting it. Guy's a media company owner posting media grabbing headlines - just like the former insurrectionist in chief. Fascist's gonna fash.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @09:52PM (3 children)
If this is what you call fascism, I support it 💯%
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @10:53PM (1 child)
What for a useless unicode symbol. I keep getting surprised by what nonsense has been stuffed there.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Sunday March 12, @01:29AM
Your posts are not unicode symbols, I don't know who told you that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday March 12, @10:52PM
Mental disability there, sparky? The word he used was "fascist," not "fascism" and Musk is indeed a fascist, like Rupert Murdoch and all of his employees and half of his viewers. Oh, and former President Pinocchio.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:11AM (1 child)
I truly wish I could understand the "thinking" of people like you. You way way way overthink things. You must think you're some detective? Maybe watch far too many cop shows?
News media is and always has been a competition machine vying for everyone's attention and the $ it will bring. Fierce competition. Getting paid to come up with clever attention-grabbing headline wording. They'll jump at anything, as you know. That you think Musk is pandering to them? You mock Musk, but look at the idiots clamoring away.
Why don't you look into your own soul (that I doubt exists) and try to figure out why you would have so much hatred for someone who is truly amazing at what he's done, including greatly reducing carbon output. Find something useful to do with your pitiful life.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @05:39AM
im gettin a boner
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 11, @11:16PM (8 children)
I have come to realize there are a lot of people who want heroes to believe in so badly they'll latch on to darn near any megalomaniac who seems strong, and make their megalomania 10 times worse by accepting and encouraging it. Wiser VIPs resist this blandishment. Musk is clearly not one of the wiser ones.
(Score: 5, Funny) by sjames on Saturday March 11, @11:35PM (1 child)
I hereby propose the neologism "goobermensch" to describe Musk et. al.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RedGreen on Sunday March 12, @12:16AM
"I hereby propose the neologism "goobermensch" to describe Musk et. al."
I nominate "Slimy piece of shit" for the reference to him and others like him.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 4, Funny) by istartedi on Sunday March 12, @12:49AM (1 child)
I'll withhold judgement until I'm in his shoes, although I'm quite confident that if I had that much money and power I'd use it to the betterment of mankind, putting Musk and all the other billionaires to shame as you all basked in the glow of my godlike benevolence and... oh... shit. This is hard.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:52AM
Sounds like you have what it takes to be "hardcore" my friend. Please donate your life to the stock price.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday March 12, @10:59AM (3 children)
I believe this is a flaw in our evolution that will probably prevent our species from achieving the destiny that we could have had without it. Among a group of gorillas, one male will become the leader and his back will turn white. The rest of the group will admire him. In humans you can see similar behavior, on social media people today are uncritically 'following' the leaders they admire. Those on the other hand, will act crazy in order to appease their flock. The same goes for politics, which are mostly an elaborate show.
In the past it must have been beneficial for humankind to have ruthless, thoughtless leaders, but this "design flaw" will hold us back if we want to excel as a species.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday March 12, @04:18PM (1 child)
I'm not sure we're actually biologically predisposed to admire ruthless, thoughtless leaders.
I think a bigger part of the problem is that as civilization grew beyond the tribal level, we stopped personally knowing the individuals we chose to lead us. Which allowed ruthlessly selfish leaders to present themselves as more socially acceptable as they climbed to power, and have it be widely believed. And from positions of power they were then able to shape the rules governing society, both legal and cultural, in ways that facilitated accumulating more wealth and power into their hands.
You could even argue that the rise of civilization is essentially the story of kings learning to more efficiently farm their fellow humans for wealth and labor - the benefits to individuals within the society are dubious. We benefit from the improving technology facilitated by a larger population of specialist thinkers, but beyond that... we're working an estimated 4x as many hours per week as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, producing vastly more wealth, and almost all of that wealth ends up going to someone else, when it used to go to us and those we chose to gift it to (gift economies seemingly being the norm in tribal cultures rather than market economies). And even with our extended lifespans we've got substantially fewer total leisure hours in our entire lifetime than they did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @10:27PM
I think it's all way simpler than that. We simply like to see someone get a beat down, and don't care if it's unfair or even fake. Just make the bad guy wear a black cape and let him get a beat down. USA! USA! USA!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 12, @10:59PM
The herding instinct is very strong in most members of our species. To see a good demonstration, drive down the interstate at five MPH under the limit and you'll see herds of cars passing you and always staying together, and in their own herds. And I doubt they even realize they're doing it. The funniest part is, after they all pass you, if you see a cop parked in the median you will pass all of them, then they will pass you again.
It's a fucking zoo. We're no different than any of the other animals, little reasoning or logic and all emotion.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday March 12, @10:41PM
What do you call a hole in the ground meant to trap a donkey? That's yer boy Elon.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Monday March 13, @12:59AM
Musk has railed against the "woke", supported anti-black Scott Adams, denigrated Fauci, and mocked people with disabilities.
He's all set to run for office.