Technology

Elon’s Response To A Working(?) Employee Was So Bad That Someone Realized Twitter Is Basically Circuit City Now. Prepare For HR Nightmares.

Somewhere, an Elon stan is studying the secrets of alchemy to explain why this is all just a 4D chess move.

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Twitter HR after being expected to do their jobs.

Elon Musk is breaking Twitter. In several ways, actually. Twitter is so broken that I have to set up a few roles and definitions prior to being able to explain how broken it is. When I say Twitter, I refer to three apparently independent facets. First, the experience of using Twitter is broken. Remember when one of the things that set Twitter apart from other social media apps was its 280-character limit? Yeah, he broke that. Posting pictures? Well, about that infrastructure:

Second, the idea of Twitter is breaking. Twitter used to be one of those cool, high-tech places to work where you knew you’d be surrounded by people who were on the cutting edge of innovation. Now, after the Halli situation, Twitter is starting to be recognized as the place that fires the real movers and shakers of the industry:

And that’s before you factor in the whole employees-having-to-bring-their-own-toilet-paper-now thing.

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What was once a go-to name for a cool, tech-savvy workplace is now a crappy (pun intended) Parler Light. The main developments that have been displayed under Elon’s Twitter have just been rampant discrimination.

Third, and here is where the stuff gets really interesting and legal, Twitter as a work place is broken. Not just in the “can I borrow toilet paper, I forgot mine at home” way, but also in the Twitter doesn’t seem to have a functioning HR department way.

Nine days? Dude had to hound HR to find out if he was employed for nine days and only got a hard answer after the CEO mocked him publicly for having muscular dystrophy? This sort of thing only happens for companies whose HR is in shambles. Given Twitter’s brokenness, people are creating brilliant ways to salvage the scraps of this mess.

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@pearlmania500

Honestly circuit city going under was a net positive for all my friends income. #circuitcity #grift #recession #elonmusk #twitter #pearlmania500 #itsgettingworse #resume #2009 im sure some tech bro will come into the comments to tell me how this doesnt work anymore. Dont care.

♬ original sound – Alex Pearlman

This is a great video and you should watch it, but for the sake of brevity and the off chance that the United States bans TikTok, I’ll give you the gist here. There was a recession. Circuit City (basically the Blood version of Best Buy) went out of business. Like, totally. Enterprising people who then realized that Circuit City no longer had a working HR and realized that they needed some extra oomph on their resumes starting putting that they worked at Circuit City and had their friends vouch for them — with no regard for if it was true or not, because how else would their employer know? Good luck proving that Thomas wasn’t the floor manager at Circuit City for the last three years WITH NO HR.

Now, how does this relate to Twitter? Say you just start telling prospective employers that you worked at Twitter. Who is going to verify that you didn’t work there? King Twit? He can’t even properly manage the list of people he CAN’T fire — you think he and whatever remains of the HR department can handle going through the binder of people that he already let go?

Mind you, given that this is dated before the Halli debacle, he’d be at least the 5th person from the “do not fire” list who was let go. And these aren’t little boo-boos. These are multimillion-dollar mistakes happening with relative frequency.

Let’s not forget that Twitter’s not-yet-defunct HR department has other roles that it should be performing. If the HR department can’t promptly tell a “$100m dollars gone if we fire him” employee if he’s still working for the company or not, God forbid there’s a sexual harassment claim, a racial discrimination claim, or anything else that could go wrong at the workplace or while using the app that HR provides some defense against.

Welp. That’s about what you’d expect of a company with no accountability mechanisms. When the inevitable massive Twitter lawsuits come down, you know where to find more info about it.

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

 

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