California culture is often referred to as a “bubble.” Listen to some of the coastal elite on the west coast for more than 10 minutes and you’ll begin to see a self-inflicted kind of ignorance where facts and logic take a back seat to emotions and virtue signaling.
But nothing puts into perspective just how bad the bubble is then when it’s popped and reality begins to seep into the carefully constructed belief system the bubble afforded.
Case in point, a Twitter employee found himself fired after he went after Tesla/Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
The entire story began with Musk apologizing for Twitter’s slowness in various countries. Eric Frohnheofer, a then-Twitter employee Quote-tweeted Musk, effectively calling him a liar.
“I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong,” said Frohnhoefer.
Musk responded by asking the Twitter employee to give him the correct number of RPC’s and then followed up with a tweet asking him openly what Frohnhoefer has done to fix this problem. To be fair, Frohnhoefer spelled the problem out, but Musk responded to one person noting that the attitude Frohnhoefer presented wasn’t one Musk would want at his new company.
“He’s fired,” tweeted the CEO.
This tweet caused a massive firestorm with two sides forming. There are those that believe Musk fired the employee for knowing more than he did and that he had the cajones to fire back publicly against something his boss said.
The other side understands Musk’s actions far more clearly. Frohnhoefer showed a willingness to defy the boss in public and had Musk continued to let him work at the company he would have become something of a figurehead for defiance against Musk. He couldn’t let that fester, especially with his company in the turbulent state it is.
If Frohnhoefer had kept all of this to a private chat between him and Musk, the CEO might have set up some time to talk with him about it and a solution could have been reached, but the entitlement mentality of Silicon Valley was so strong that the employee thought it best to lash out publicly.
Musk had no choice but to terminate his employment, even if the man was insightful. Frohnhoefer left him with no other option. The axe had to fall.
Perhaps in the days of Twitter that was, he may very well have gotten away with it but Musk is clearly not the velvet-gloved California CEO that treats their business like it’s a daycare for adults. Musk is running a business, not a rec center, and his employees are no longer allowed to be a drag on the company. Their “demands” will fall on deaf ears before they’re fired, and those who took months off for “mental health” while still being paid will find themselves searching for employment at other companies that will pay them to be children.
Rest assured, these kinds of employees can’t be supported forever and the companies will suffer greatly as a result. Many people will be fired or laid off as the reality of markets and bad economies come crashing down and without the support of sound business practices, it’s going to crash hard.
In fact, this isn’t a future event, it’s already happening.
No comments:
Post a Comment