Twitter is officially hiring again, in the wake of a series of layoffs that has dropped the company from 7,500 employees to around 2,700.
CEO Elon Musk announced that sales and engineering positions are now open in an all-hands meeting today. Twitter recruiters have been reaching out to potential employees since last week, reports show.
Do you have what it takes to work at the company? Going by past precedent, you’ll have to be okay with your company making headlines about five times a day. But that’s just the start. Here’s what to know about the ins and outs of Twitter’s company culture at the moment.
1. Be Hardcore
One wave of layoffs was triggered last week by an ultimatum from Musk, the not-so-behind-the-scenes billionare pulling the social platform’s strings. Anyone who wasn’t willing to be “hardcore” in the immediate future was shown the door.
“This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” ~Musk
This ultimatum led to hundreds more workers leaving. But it’s a bit of a rorschach test: Do you take Musk’s word at face value, seeing a straight shooter whose earned his billions through hard work and willpower? If so, joining Twitter is the opportunity to make your mark as well.
But perhaps your boss telling you to be more hardcore just reminds you of other, less wealthy bosses hoping to compensate for their poor work ethic by squeezing more work out of their employees.
2. No Free Lunches
And don’t expect to be hardcore with a full stomach on the company’s dime: One of Musk’s cost-cutting measures was getting rid of lunches.
Musk holds that providing food for employees cost $400 per lunch (a former employee estimates this cost to be $20-25 per person). Now, employees will have to work through lunches and meetings without the perk encouraging them.
But don’t worry. For every carrot that Twitter has recently removed, it has added a stick: In-office attendance is now mandatory.
3. No Working From Home
Another change: Workers are now expected to work a minimum of 40 hours a week at the company’s physical offices.
Remote work has been normalized in the past few years thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, but not everyone’s happy about it. Some managers cite the arguable benefits of connections and conversation that can only happen naturally when everyone’s physically present. Critics argue that businesses are just trying to justify real estate deals, or that managers want to indulge their worst micromanagement tendencies.
Whatever the case, Twitter’s zero-tolerance policy is another change that makes working at the organization appear to be more of a chore, and will shape the culture by defacto filtering out anyone without the flexibility or ability to turn up for 40 hours a week.
But if they’re really hardcore, they’ll be working 80 hours a week, so that’s kinda like working from home half the time when you think about it.
If you’d rather work from home, here are some companies that will let you do just that.
4. You Might Get Fired at a Moment’s Notice
Finally, you may want to keep your mouth shut around your boss. Musk can accept some disagreement, but won’t want anyone challenging his overall worldview, judging from the outcome of one engineer who critiqued his coding knowledge. You guessed it, he was fired, right in between two waves of layoffs. New employees should plan to deal with the same.
That’s another potential problem for Twitter moving forwards: New employee retention. Takeovers and acquisitions are tough in the best of times — studies show that a stunning 70 and 90 percent of acquisitions fail.
If Musk plans to earn enough to justify the billion-a-year debt he’s now in just to keep Twitter going, he has a lot of work ahead of him, and he needs a lot of hardcore employees with their own lunches to do it for him.
