Happy Thanksgiving everyone! As we sit at home, digesting our weekend’s many heavy meals, I figure it’s a good time to talk about work and some of the issues facing the younger generation and their not-so young bosses.
For instance, the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, is under harsh criticism for his memo to Twitter employees stating that from now on he would expect not only in person attendance but also “hardcore” work. He asked that they sign a loyalty pledge committing to work long hours. Unwilling workers are asked to leave Twitter. As you can imagine, Musk’s request was treated poorly on Twitter and within the company itself. Hundreds of employees quit, while the twitterverse has been abuzz with hot takes on how awful, insensitive, and reckless (and worse!) Musk is.
To be sure, Musk’s memo is unconventional and perhaps not the most straightforward approach to building employee loyalty. But it does have the merit of both getting the message out and serving as an effective sorting mechanism. What exactly it sorts for, however, I am not entirely certain. Were I to receive such a memo from my boss, I would probably welcome it, as I think in any workplace the 80-20 rule applies: 20 percent of people do 80 percent of the work. That said, working harder is no guarantee of good results. Only time will tell what kinds of employees are left at Twitter.
It appears, though, that another significant upside to Musk’ memo is that he is actually saying out loud what many bosses think, but don’t dare say publicly. See for instance this Wall Street Journal article titled, “Is Elon Musk Your Boss’s Anger Translator?” A tidbit:
Your boss probably hasn’t demanded a loyalty pledge and almost certainly doesn’t own a rocket ship, but the person calling the shots at your company might be more like Elon Musk than you realize.
On the inside, anyway….
Managers who think the working world has gone soft in recent years, with all the talk of flexibility and work-life balance, say they envy Mr. Musk’s unfiltered style and share his craving for maximum effort—even if they wouldn’t act quite as forcefully as the world’s richest person….
To these frustrated executives, Mr. Musk is what the comedian Keegan-Michael Key was to former President Barack Obama: the anger translator. He delivers the unvarnished version of what the person in charge is truly thinking and feeling but can’t say out loud.
One question is why many bosses are so frustrated with their younger employees. Dealing with people is annoying. I often feel sorry for my bosses having to spend so much of their work time appeasing people’s hurt feelings and sensibilities, cleaning up after miscommunications, and other such problems. But today, something new seems to be going on. It’s as if between the quiet quitting and all the talk about work and life balance, some employees have forgotten that their employment is at-will and that their bosses are the ones assessing whether or not workers are contributing enough value to their employers to justify what these workers are paid.
I don’t have any answers and I wonder if readers have better theories than I. But I wonder whether this is just the beginning and a symptom of a much bigger problem. This piece by Fredrick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute called “Are College Classes too Hard for Today’s Students? Alarming Numbers Say ‘Yes’,” hints at some of the issues. Some soundbites:
On that point, a new survey of 1,000 four-year college students by Intelligent.com offers illumination. While these kinds of surveys should always be treated with appropriate caution, the results are provocative, especially against the backdrop of the NYU’s dust-up with professor Jones.
For starters, 87% answered that they’ve thought at least one class was too difficult and that the professor should have made it easier; 64% said this was the case with “a few” or “most” of their classes.
While the students said they tended to respond by studying more or asking for help, 8% reported that they had filed a complaint against the professor. When it comes to challenging classes, 18% said the instructor should “definitely” have been forced to make the class easier (48% said “maybe”).
The most eye-catching finding, though, was what the students reported about their work habits. Most said they’re making an effort in their studies, with 64% reporting that they put “a lot of effort” into school. But, remarkably, of the students who answered they’re putting in a lot of effort, a third said they devote fewer than five hours a week to studying and homework – and 70% said they spend no more than 10 hours a week on schoolwork.
He concludes, “Whether or not students have other interests or responsibilities, treating college as an expensive multiyear holiday isn’t good for students, colleges or the taxpayers who subsidize much of this activity.”
Veronique de Rugy is a Senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and syndicated columnist at Creators.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Nov 24 2022 at 10:53am
I worked for Huawei for a while, and when news of the Musk pledge came out, a colleague still there commented immediately: He wants to be the Huawei of the USA…
But there are different material conditions at play, I fear. Huawei was able to extract similarly punishing commitments from its employees because it paid them outrageous sums in this relatively low-earning country, and selects ruthlessly for those people who are willing to devote their entire lives to their company. The internal newspaper (which I translated while I was there) is full of stories by employees of missing the births of their children, parents’ funerals, and any number of anniversaries and birthdays, but always with the same payoff: it was all worth it in the end.
There is no doubt a percentage of people who feel that way (or can be induced to feel that way), and from China’s large population, Huawei skims off that percentage, and puts them to work. If Musk wants to similarly collect America’s Most Dedicated, he will have to do the same thing. Advertising that that’s what he wants is a decent step forward. But of course, if Musk gets them, that means other bosses won’t. There is a bit of zero-sum competition here. So Musk is not so much the anger translator for other bosses; he’s their evil twin, come to take what’s theirs.
vince
Nov 24 2022 at 12:44pm
When I was younger, my friends and I were thankful to have jobs. We were taught that employees should please the customer. There were even slogans such as ” the customer is always right” and “the customer is your boss.” That attitude seems to be reversing: customers are there to please employees.
Brendan Long
Nov 24 2022 at 2:26pm
I like the idea of working somewhere where there’s high standards, like the culture Netflix has always had. The problem with Twitter is that Musk seems to be looking for people with a commitment to the company while showing that he has no commitment to them
Netflix will tell you if you’re not meeting standards and work with you to improve (for a short time), and if you don’t they’ll show the door as politely as possible. Twitter will apparently glance at a screenshot of your code this week, lock you out of the office and maybe eventually let you know you were fired by announcing it to the world on Twitter.
Plus it matters what work conditons and compensation you agreed to when starting the job. Even if I was willing to work 80 hour weeks including weekends with no remote work, I’d expect a (huge) increase in compensation to make up for it (if the company is really at risk of bankruptcy they can use equity bonuses).
Felix
Nov 27 2022 at 8:34pm
I’d say $44B is quite a commitment.
Daniel Carroll
Nov 24 2022 at 2:39pm
Bosses want more work for less money; employees want more money for less work. Employment is a running compromise between the two. Musk tried to renegotiate the terms of employment by fiat. Employees that had options said no. It was pretty naïve to think the results would be any different.
Fazal Majid
Nov 24 2022 at 4:36pm
The employees had a choice between signing up for doubled workloads since they would be doing the work for those laid off, or three months’ severance. There’s a rational calculation to be made as to the probability of Twitter going bankrupt in fairly short order and them ending unemployed anyway with no severance at all. I suspect all the top performers, who still have plenty of options, took the money and ran.
BRetty
Nov 24 2022 at 10:28pm
There was a picture making the rounds: two group photos of Twitter employees “before & after”.
Now, I’m sure this was not all employees vs. who’s left, and of course the pics were cherry-picked to show the greatest contrast in people. Still, I laughed out loud:
So it’s just us nerds now. Duh.
I went to MIT, back when it was known for engineering not economics. (Sorry, that was snide….) The after picture looked so much like my undergraduate days I could almost name people: …looks like Feroze, is that Max? Dimitri! I thought I saw a guy we had to carry home from the library one night and force him to sleep. I kept looking for cans of Jolt.
So Musk has pared down to just the guys who still think 72-hr coding binges are heroic, and who can actually deliver stuff. What a shocker. This is exactly who you want for a six-week code war. Also the culture of every start-up I have encountered.
As for demographics, it looks like the first rough cut was simply “fire all the white girls.” As for “Silicon Valley culture” being all white men, I have always seen boyz of every ethnicity (*) and accent in the industry. The nerd lab culture is its own tribe, and other cultural markers are less important for self esteem to kids whose identity has always been about achieving in school.
Musk’s communication that I read was easily understood by me for what it said and what it meant. Anybody who was valuable and knew it laughed at “screenshot x lines of code” as BS. Translation: tell me what you do here in 60 seconds. People with no solid contributions and no fluency in the codebase would be scrambling for linecount. Anybody who showed up with lists of scattered commits was like a kid triple-spacing a term paper last minute, grade: D: does not show mastery of the material
I don’t know whether all this will bring Twitter to profitability, but it tells me Musk wants to do some major Apollo-type project with twitter right away. My number of six weeks is not arbitrary, look for the new thing to be announced around that time.
BR
* – The kid we carried home from the library was African-American, one of the 3 I met in four years at the ‘tute (same as the number of _Africans_ I met) and he was killing himself trying to overachieve. Diversity at the Institute took a strange trajectory, and I would like to have submitted an amicus brief in the current Supreme Court case about it. Bottom line: back then nobody, none of the students cared or ever thought about race, certainly I never did (mostly because we all had WORK to do) but administration attempts to force “Diversity” soon and clumsily changed that.
Mark Barbieri
Nov 25 2022 at 8:55am
I think it would have gone over much better if each employee had also been given some sort of upside, perhaps a reward if the company meets some milestone. It felt like it was all stick and no carrot.
robc
Nov 25 2022 at 12:06pm
I think the carrot is subtle. BRetty got it in the post just above yours. The carrot is getting to work with the kind of people you want to work with. I think a financial carrot will follow, if it works out. But Musk is selecting for a different preference.
Peter
Nov 25 2022 at 9:31pm
The problem here is you are missing the hypocrisy angle, I’ve worked from burger flipper to C-Level in my life and I made it a point any time I heard a middle manager acting like you think “all managers want” I made it a point to remind the manager in relationship to ME, he was just a front line employee to and I held them to the exactly same level of effort they expected from their employees and you would be amazed how many quickly changed their tune or I had fired. Musk can play this game all he wants but you and I both know he can’t live my his own standard and would chafe if he was held to it. This has nothing to do with work ethic, subordinates, productivity, etc; this is purely about unadulterated power.
Comments are closed.