"I'm one of the unlucky (or lucky) engineers that got laid off from Twitter," aptly named user LaidOffIn140 posted to Reddit this morning. "They haven't even told us yet, but woke up to find my mail client prompting for a password."
As Twitter's returning CEO Jack Dorsey, uh, pivots the business, today the company begins to lay off eight percent of its workforce, a move announced yesterday and rumored last week.
In an email to staff, Dorsey wrote that Twitter would "part ways with up to 336 people from across the company" in an effort to "put our company on a stronger path to grow." But he also promised to do so "with the utmost respect for each and every person," so yeah.
In what Gawker quips is "the digital equivalent of showing up at your door and the locks have been changed," another former employee Tweeted his similar experience:
I've been impacted by $TWTR's layoffs. This is how I found out this morning. pic.twitter.com/MbjFwYLcU2
— Bart Teeuwisse (@bartt) October 13, 2015
Please note that @twitter also called to tell personally I was laid off. Found out differently though before I could get that voice mail.
— Bart Teeuwisse (@bartt) October 13, 2015
Cool. A voicemail breakup.
Meanwhile, as a leaner company forges ahead, Dorsey named Omid Kordestani, Google's former chief business officer, the new executive chairman of Twitter today. Kordestani worked at Google since 1999, where he was the 11th employee.
I’ve had good fortune to be at three: Netscape, @google, and now @twitter.
— Omid Kordestani (@omidkordestani) October 14, 2015
Lets hope Twitter and Netscape don't have too much in common these days. Until this morning's announcement, Kordestani had tweeted a grand total of nine times.
In part via the executive chairman and layoff announcements, Twitter is signaling its aim to attract more users and make more money for investors. To that end, the company recently debuted a new "moments" feature with no lack of pomp and confirmed it's working on a product that will expand on that famous 140 character limit.
As far as the employees receiving pink slips, many of them are reportedly engineers. Some of them, one Twitter staffer writes, are people of color, which could be interpreted a number of ways. Such as, at least there were people of color to lay off?
Count of PoC @twitter laid off today: 5
All, in addition to the jobs they were paid for, did diversity work.
There's a message for you.
— Erica:joy: (@EricaJoy) October 13, 2015
SFist recently spoke with a former Twitter employee, Mark S. Luckie, who shared his experience as a black man at the less than diverse company. At last estimate, 4 percent of current Twitter employees were black, though the company explicitly seeks to "increase underrepresented minorities overall to 11% (in the US)" by next year. It's a stark contrast to the 27 percent of Twitter users who are black, according to the Pew Research Center.
"Twitter will go to great lengths to take care of each individual by providing generous exit packages and help finding a new job," Dorsey added in his email, and most predict that the many laid off engineers will have little trouble finding jobs in the tech-heavy Bay area, least of all with Twitter on their resumes.
Previously: Twitter Laying Off 8% Of Workforce, CEO Says 'This Isn't Easy. But It Is Right.' [Updated]