Today it’s been ten days since the Twitter mass layoff process began. Things looked bad from the beginning, and as we learned over the course of that weekend, there was a real bloodbath, with entire departments being laid off en masse, in some cases so arbitrarily that a few hours later the social network was forced to contact some of the laid off (according to sources dozens of them) and ask them to return to work.

Their manpower was drastically reduced in a single weekend, That rough part of Elon Musk’s Twitter plans seemed to be overand that it is time to focus on business plans and try to improve the monetization of the social network, which is what really worries the billionaire who, I have no proof, but there is no doubt, every day he must regret more the courage to say that he wanted to buy Twitter.

And I say it seemed like the rough part was over, but it turns out it wasn’t. And so it is that this weekend, more specifically yesterday Sunday, Twitter would make a second massive layoff. The process that according to casey newton fonts, would end up with at least 80% of external workers, i.e. subcontractors of the social network through service companies and the like. So far, the number of subcontracted employees has hovered around 5,500, but the layoffs would affect roughly 4,400.

Update: Company sources tell me Twitter laid off about 4,400 of its roughly 5,500 contract employees yesterday, with cuts expected to have a significant impact on content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site running.

The people inside are stunned.

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 13, 2022

The fact that these were subcontractors should not make us think that they were not part of Twitter’s workforce, quite the contrary. worked in departments such as content moderation (exactly the only one that can calm the uncertainty of advertisers) and, among other things, marketing. Like those hired directly by Twitter, they had access to the company’s Slack and participated in the day-to-day work of the social network like everyone else.

And I say they had access to Slack in the past as well, because the forms were again conspicuous by their absence, so many of these workers found that Twitter had decided to drop their services just trying to access this communication tool. internal communication, just to found that his access to it had been revoked. Others, as is often caricatured, found out “through the press” and confirmed this when trying to access Slack.

An evil said to be endemic in large tech companies is the evil of overstaffing as a technique to retain talent and prevent them from leaving other companies (competition, you know what I mean). Twitter was certainly limping along on this basis until a few days ago, but since then, and even with the need to clean up the accounts, the total number of workers fired from Twitter is far, far beyond reason. And yes, I repeat, Elon Musk needs his bills to settle, but selling all four wheels of a car to pay for gas was never the best idea.