A Twitter employee unable to find out if she still has a job — even after calling her head of HR — had to tweet to CEO Elon Musk to resolve her employment status. It went as expected – if not worse.
Haraldur Thorleifsson (aka, Halli) said in a tweet yesterday that his work computer was shut down nine days ago, joining a group of about 200 Twitter employees who were laid off in late February. He said he didn’t receive any confirmation of his lay-off, and even HR didn’t know the answer.
“Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here,” Thorleifsson Asked his boss; And he answered, asking what Thorleifsson was working on on Twitter.
“I would need to break confidentiality here to answer this question,” Thorleifson tweeted in response, to which Musk spoke openly on Twitter about workplace issues, saying, “Allowed, you go ahead.” ”
Thorleifson was vague, responding that he had led an effort to save $500k on SaaS contracts while helping close others, and helped prioritize design projects across the company “to make sure we Were able to deliver with a small team.”
When Musk asked for details, Thorleifsson said that the SaaS contract in question was with Figma, and that he was working with “all active design projects”. Musk’s response was brief, if not petulant: a pair of laughing-crying emojis.
The brief conversation between Musk and Thorleifson ended with Twitter HR contacting Halli shortly after the exchange to confirm that she had been cut off, ex-Tweep Said,
can’t leave well enough alone
Along with the aforementioned work, Thorleifsson said he was also responsible for key design critiques at the company, was the recruiting manager for all design roles and was helping with efforts to attract youth users to the platform, all under the leadership of a senior director. From his role as Twitter’s product design team.
Thorleifsson is no stranger to product design, starting a design firm called Ueno in 2014 that has worked on projects for companies like ESPN, Apple, Walmart, Google and Twitter — so massive, in fact, that That Twitter bought the company in 2021 to fold it into its in-house design team.
The sale of Ueno to Twitter made Thorleifsson one of the highest taxpayers in Iceland after he decided to take his cut of earnings from the sale as stock options and wages rather than other less tax-intensive forms of earnings, Icelandic media reported. told. Thorleifsson’s philanthropic efforts following the sale also earned him Person of the Year awards from a quartet of Icelandic news networks and publications.
Thorleifsson became an employee of Twitter after the sale, and his tweets indicate that he is still owed money according to his employment contract.
Musk, however, could not be left well alone, and said in a tweet that Thorleifsson, who he It has been told As “independently wealthy” due to the sale of his company, “didn’t do any real work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet simultaneously tweeting stormy Can’t say I have much respect for him.”
“But was he fired? No, you can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place!”
As Thorleifson explained in a Twitter thread in response to Musk, he have muscular dystrophy Which has been getting worse over the years.
While his health problems started in his legs, Thorleifsson said his hands also started to weaken. “I haven’t been able to do physical work for extended periods of time without starting to cramp in my hands.” This wasn’t a problem under the old Twitter regime, Thorleifsson said, because his job was mostly to guide teams and help with planning.
Regarding Musk’s demand that Twitter managers should also be coding like engineers, Thorleifsson said he told HR that he was unable to work as a hands-on designer because of his muscular dystrophy. Due to the uncertainty, Thorleifsson said that he asked and received guidance from his manager Weekly as to what projects he should work on, “and then I proceeded to do those things. Every single one of them.”
Twitter still owes Thorleifsson money for which he is under contract – at least according to Thorleifsson’s own tweets. Just add this to the pile of unpaid bills Twitter is racking up and we’ll see if it really pays off.
register We reached out to see if he plans to take action against Musk or Twitter, or Thorleifsson in a public forum for what he said is “confidential health information,” but we haven’t heard back.