We're All Family Here

In November 2022, after “letting go” of about a third of its original workforce, Elon Musk sent an email to the remaining Twitter employees asking them to click a button to confirm that they were committed to working “hardcore” for the company’s next phase. Those who did not click by the deadline would be treated as having resigned. A few months earlier, Twitter’s former leadership had described it as a family. The family metaphor is endemic to tech. Amazon has “Day 1 culture”, while Google offered free meals, nap pods, and climbing walls, and expected employees to treat the campus as home. The metaphor does real work: it extracts commitment, discourages outside offers, and makes employees (particularly younger ones) feel that the relationship is something other than a transaction. What it does not do is change what the relationship actually is. Families (at least, those outside organized crime) do not terminate members for underperformance. They do not eliminate positions when…