“Saturday was cleaning up,” he says. Much of the day was spent removing access from departed colleagues and trying to get everything as stable as possible in case something went wrong with the platform. “Sometimes you just have to focus on the task at hand,” says the engineer. “We did, and we made it happen, and it hurt. But things are still going…for now.”
But they barely go. Musk has been pushing for a series of new updates to the site, threatening to fire staff who fail to meet his goals. In one of the most iconic images of the chaos of recent weeks, Esther Crawford, whose team was tasked with rolling out Musk’s plans for an update to Twitter Blue, was caught sleeping on the floor from Twitter’s offices to try to roll out the update before the November 7 deadline – otherwise she and her team would reportedly be fired. The update was pushed to the Apple App Store on November 5, before the deadline, although Crawford had to clarify that “the new Blue isn’t live yet.” Musk has fired all but two of Twitter’s communications staff, according to current and former employees WIRED has spoken with — meaning public tweets from individual employees are now de facto statements by the company.
That partial success comes with its own risks. “There’s a lot of scrambling to make sure everything is set up and ready,” says the engineer. “We’re doing some very hasty testing of things.” But every new, hasty change has an impact on performance and how different parts of the platform interact. “Everything gets really complicated when you start pushing a lot of code very quickly after a week or nothing at all,” he says, admitting he has stability issues. These problems are compounded by the fact that the staff tasked with making them overworked, overworked and overtired. “It’s not sustainable,” says the engineer. “People will burn out. People will make mistakes they wouldn’t have made had they had a good night’s sleep.”
Still, Twitter employees persist. The looming threat of joining those the company has already axed has caused many current Twitter employees to take their advice on what life is like under the new CEO and his supporters. “The amount of chaos and disorder following the Elon Musk acquisition just a week ago is sad and disturbing,” said Eddie Perez, a board member of the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group dedicated to election security and integrity, and former director of product management. at Twitter. This week, Perez warned WIRED that the integrity of the US midterm exams was being jeopardized by Musk’s firings. “With bread-and-butter issues such as job security and caring for their families at stake, current and former employees remain anxious, intimidated and fearful — and unwilling to tell their stories.”
DeMichiel says he worked on a technical project in a team of five people. “I was one of the five and the other four people who worked on it are gone,” he says. “I don’t know how I’ll be able to keep dealing with all the things they did to build that project. The thought of even trying to take on all that work gives me nightmares.” Yet he is less concerned about the workload than about the decimation of corporate culture. “To know that it’s slowly crumbling every day, that people you know, work with, and be friends with are gone, it’s worse than anyone working an extra 20 hours or something like that.”
Still, Twitter employees keep coming to the office every day. They do it partly because they value the work they do and the platform they help support is important. They’re also doing it because they want to keep their jobs at a time when layoffs hit the entire tech industry.
And now some of the people who were fired a few days ago are being called back to work as management realizes that their skills are needed to meet project rollout deadlines. The engineer advises them to decline the chance to return. “If someone shows you their true self, believe them,” says the engineer, who thinks they shouldn’t turn back. If they had let me go and were suddenly in a rush to get me back, that would confirm that this was not a place that would appreciate any technical rigor. I would take the money and run.”
