Musk recruits engineers for “Twitter 2.0” after mass layoffs and resignations

Having gutted Twitter's staff, Elon Musk told remaining employees he plans to hire new engineers and salespeople, The Verge reported Monday. "During an all-hands meeting with Twitter employees today, Musk said that the company is done with layoffs and actively recruiting for roles in engineering and sales and that employees are encouraged to make referrals, according to two people who attended and a partial recording obtained by The Verge," the report said.

Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on October 27 and laid off about half of the company's 7,500 employees. He sent an ultimatum to the remaining staff last week, saying they must commit to "working long hours at high intensity" to keep their jobs; the ultimatum came with the choice of staying at the company or resigning with three months of severance.

Some sales employees who opted to stay after Musk's ultimatum were reportedly laid off shortly after. With the latest departures, Twitter was reportedly left with about 2,700 employees. Musk also laid off about 5,000 contractors and banned remote work, while warning staff of a "dire" economic outlook.

In yesterday's all-hands meeting, Musk reportedly told staff that "in terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority." Another Verge report last week said that "Twitter recruiters have already started reaching out to outside engineers to see if they want to join 'Twitter 2.0—an Elon company.'"

Musk seeks “anyone who actually writes software”

Musk told employees in his ultimatum email that under his ownership, Twitter will be "much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway."

After Musk's ultimatum deadline passed, he began meeting with engineers who chose to stay. In an email to staff on Friday, Musk wrote, "Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code."

The Twitter careers page wasn't listing any open jobs today. There were more than 100 job openings before Musk took over.

Musk may have to hire engineers quickly to keep Twitter systems running properly. A Washington Post report quoted a former employee as saying layoffs and other departures "have left multiple critical systems down to two, one or even zero engineers." Gutted departments include "Twitter's traffic and front end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services," a Verge report said. "The team that maintains Twitter's core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone."

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