A former Twitter worker who was fired by Elon Musk without warning after ten years of service has shared his vision of what will happen to the social media platform. Mr Ihara was a staff machine learning engineer at the company and worked there for most of his working life.
Although he liked the atmosphere in the San Francisco based office, Ihara thought that Twitter was rudderless in a storm, and he feared for the future of the platform - so he was optimistic when the tech billionaire and SpaceX founder snapped it up for $44 billion (£37.9 billion) in October. But he was in for a shock, as he was soon fired alongside other senior members of staff.
Image:
NTB/AFP via Getty Images)Speaking to the Mirror, he said: "I think a lot of people already said how great the workplace culture was before Elon, I agree with all of them.
"I would also say, we were in a 'big corp' syndrome, it took months or even years to make even the smallest change in the product - I was trapped in never-ending quarterly planning meetings that took weeks.
"Working from home due to Covid was also making things less efficient - the lack of hallway conversations and over-the-isle knowledge sharing meant that all communication had to be formal, and had to be explicitly documented.
"I also found some data that suggested that Twitter is on a path to a slow death. We were in a 'boiling frog syndrome', we needed some shakeup and Elon Musk seemed to be the best option we had."
The data Ihara refers to is a report by another Twitter employee who found that the most active English-speaking users were using the platform less and less, including celebrities who favoured rival platforms.
They described the loss as "devastating", and one Twitter researcher wrote: "It seems as though there is a significant discrepancy between what I might imagine are our company values and our growth patterns."
Musk bought Twitter after months of drawn-out negotiations and legal wrangles, and had previously accused senior figures within the company of misleading him and investors over the number of fake accounts operating on the social media platform.
He was even sued by Twitter when he threatened to pull out of the deal over the number of 'bots', before making a surprise U-turn to give it the go ahead earlier this year.
But while Ihara thought Musk would be a breath of fresh air for the company, he soon found himself on the wrong end of a P45.
He continued: "You know that moment when you are playing a game, and suddenly you are staring at the game over screen, without the slightest idea what just happened? That's exactly how I felt after getting the email.
"If you have any bit of self-awareness that you did something wrong, or were being lazy, you would know that you'd been caught. But for me, or for any of us who received the same email, we could think of nothing that rang a bell.
Ihara claims that some 'top talented' and 'respected' folks were let go by Twitter, including people who were on time off at the time.
"Being accused of writing unsatisfactory code while on time off does not make sense at all" he adds.
Image:
Getty Images)After Musk purchased Twitter, some employees were asked to validate their roles in the company by submitting examples of their code for judgement - but Ihara said that not enough time was given to properly read them.
He added: "There is a rumour that a few Tesla engineers stationed at the Twitter office were told to go through our code summary emails - thousands of them - in just two or three hours, and make a ranked list of engineers to get rid of.
"If that is true, it is just not possible to make any quality decisions in such a short time and with such few engineers with no context of every project.
"We are under the impression that the company just wants to find an excuse to cut more people, and in the cheapest way possible.
"We say that this has now become a Squid Game - a Squid Game, in which you are not even told what the rule of the game is."
Last month it emerged that a lawsuit had been filed against Twitter alleging the company had violated federal and state law that requires 60 days' notice of mass layoffs, as NBC News reports.
The suit, filed in San Francisco, names five current or former workers as plaintiffs, and Twitter as the defendant.
Image:
Adrien Fillon/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock)After capturing Twitter Inc, Musk reportedly terminated the contracts of Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
Agrawal and Segal were in Twitter's San Francisco headquarters when the deal closed and were escorted out, sources added.
Ihara continued: "The relationship between the employees and Elon may have been much better if he held an all-hands meeting right after the first round of layoffs and communicated his visions.
"But instead, he chose to lock himself up in a war room with just a handful of engineers.
"By the time he came out of the war room two weeks later, the lack of communication (and trust) had already separated CEO and most of the rest of the employees so far apart.
"All these observations make me think that Elon will make the engineering team very small, small enough that he knows what each one of them does, or did, and micro-manageable.
"He might as well replace most engineers with cheaper and more loyal new hires, strip down all services and functionality to the minimum, and re-create everything from scratch by the new team while keeping the existing systems alive on a life-support machine.
"This will basically be a race against time, either the legacy system breaks down with no one left with the knowledge of how it works first, or the development of the new system finishes first.
"I don't know if this really is his plan, but some existing systems have lost everyone who knew how they work - I don't know. Let's see if they can make it."
Do you have a story to sell? Get in touch with us at yourmirror@mirror.co.uk