As announced the day before, at 9 a.m. San Francisco time – 5 p.m. Paris time – many Twitter employees were notified by e-mail of their dismissal on Friday, November 4. No official figure has been communicated, but the number of jobs cut would vary between 2,000 and 3,700, for 7,500 employees, according to estimates published in the American press. An internal document sent to the thanked employees and consulted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) affirms that“about 50% of the staff will be affected”.
Between shock and nostalgia, reactions from employees poured in… on Twitter. “I am heartbroken but it has been an extraordinary adventure”says a Miami graduate. “I am happy to have lived the golden age of compassion, of kindness”, reports a colleague from San Francisco. In India, the entire marketing and communication team would have been made redundant, according to NDTV television. Even among employees who “were not thanked”one says he has ” want to vomit “.
This ” bloodbath “ is the culmination of several months of takeover of the social network by the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, says Manu Cornet, a Frenchman who was a software engineer and also sketched the life of the company in drawings. “At first glance, Elon Musk seems like a pretty cool and admirable entrepreneur, making electric cars and rockets. As a cartoonist, I like his ability not to take himself seriously. But as the months passed, the prospect of him joining the company began to smell worse and worse.explains this former Google, citing Elon Musk’s benevolence for ex-President Donald Trump and Republicans, or his erratic announcements on Twitter, making employees of ” Russian mountains “ emotional.
Mr. Cornet was dismissed on 1er November and saw his access to his computer cut off in less than an hour, for having “violated several points of regulation”. He had published a small code to allow employees to download chat messages. But also believes that his cartoons, of which he had offered a copy to Elon Musk during his visit to Twitter, played. “Any employee who speaks out against our absolute free speech policy will be fired”quipped one of his drawings.
Brutal methods
At Twitter, the dismissals are seen by many as the symbol of the expeditious, even brutal, method of Elon Musk. A collective complaint was filed in a federal court in San Francisco by employees – including Manu Cornet – for non-compliance with notice periods. In addition, management has Friday “temporarily closed” offices and suspended all access badges for reasons of ” security “. Another exercise deemed humiliating, computer scientists were asked to print all the lines of code they had written during the last thirty days, fueling the idea of layoffs decided with a purely quantitative method.
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