To those of you with kids who are thinking about going to work for Twitter, all I can say is this: The patterns you establish in the early days of your career are profound and transformative, and establish a baseline of what work can and should look like that will last throughout your working life. Anyone talented enough to get an offer from Twitter should be able to get a job at other companies as well, even in a difficult economy. I would strongly encourage people to find leaders they can truly believe in, who’ll treat them with respect, dignity, and with integrity.
A CEO at a company I used to work for one time wrote a blistering message in the company’s Slack workspace, because he was in the bathroom and saw that one of the engineers had spit their chewing gum into the urinal and it was sitting on the urinal pad. He was absolutely livid, pointing out that that disrespectful action meant that a human — almost certainly one who would be paid far, far less than the high-flying tech salaries of most of the employees at the company — was going to have to reach into the urinal to pick up someone’s spat-out gum. This CEO noted that the salary, the perks, the benefits — they didn’t give employees at the company the right to treat anyone with disrespect. In fact, it was just the opposite. He reached in himself, got the gum, and threw it out, and said that if he ever saw somebody treat the janitorial staff, the security guards, or any other employees with that disrespect, he would personally walk them out of the building. That’s the kind of leadership I can get behind, and the kind of person I want to work for and learn from.
Contrast that with this report from Casey Newton this morning: “Multiple ex-Twitter sources telling me that Robin Wheeler, the sales leader who Musk begged to stay at the company days ago when she tried to resign, has now been fired”. Who knows if she got the three months of severance she would have otherwise been granted if she had been able to resign two days before. Or with this absolute gentleman, a senior director of engineering at Twitter, who fired people, then realized they had essential institutional knowledge, and was trying to figure out how to hire them back, learn what they knew, and then fire them.
So, yes. As I was saying above. If your children are thinking of working for a post-Elon Twitter, I wish them luck. But I would strongly encourage them to deeply consider the total package of what their working life will look like, to avoid predatory, toxic management, and to look for the kinds of leaders who build truly healthy teams. The kinds of leaders with low egos, with ambitious goals that are balanced with deep empathy and a realistic understanding that your job is just one facet of a beautiful, messy life. The kinds of leaders who’ll reach into the urinal themselves, throw out the gum, and then normalize that act of service so that others want to do the same.
