The social media platform, Twitter, which has been recently acquired by Telsa CEO Elon Musk, is facing mass resignation as several employees opt for leaving work after Musk’s ultimatum of go ‘hardcore’ or go home with severance pay. The development comes days after Twitter laid off 50% of its workforce or 3,700 employees of the company’s 7,500 total strength this month.
Earlier this week, Musk told the remaining Twitter employees that going forward the company will be revamped to Twitter 2.0, which would require long hours of working at high intensity. He said, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
He further added that Twitter will be much more engineering-driven, and while design and product will still be very important, engineers will have the greatest sway.
Reports say that following this, Musk presented a poll via google forms to the remaining employees, giving options of ‘yes’ confirming their desire to remain with Twitter 2.0 or to leave the social media platform in exchange for three months of severance pay. The employees are given the deadline of 5:00 pm ET (eastern time) on Thursday.
Several disgruntled employees took to Blind, an online space where working professionals can discuss work anonymously, confirming the news that they will leave Twitter. An employee in a post said, “Speaking only for engineering here because that’s the market I’m living right now: Anyone that could succeed at Hardcore ElonTwitter can find a job without much problem even if it’s a pay cut and they know they’ll be interviewing again after the recession to get their TC back…. Anyone that isn’t good enough to go easily find a job right now is going to get worked to death and then fired anyway at ElonTwitter, so they still might as well take three months free salary and focus on rolling the interview dice as many times as possible.”
Meanwhile, a memo by the company said that the offices will remain shut till November 21. The social media app has asked its employees to comply with the company policy and to refrain from discussing confidential information on social media, and the media.
On Thursday, Musk, who is the incumbent CEO of Twitter said that he intends to find someone else as the CEO of the social media platform over time. Following his hostile takeover of the social media platform, Musk fired the entire top management of the company including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
Notably, this is not the first time that Musk has enacted a strict work policy. Earlier in May this year, the billionaire sent an email to Tesla employees making ‘work from office’ compulsory and saying that they would need to “spend a minimum of forty hours in the office per week.” However, several reports say that months after Musk's strict work policy, Tesla has been struggling to accommodate all its employees back to the offices owing to the lack of space and resources.