Musk hires engineers for 'Twitter 2.0' after massive layoffs and resignations

Expand Getty Images | NurPhoto

After gutting Twitter's staff, Elon Musk told the remaining employees that he plans to hire new engineers and salespeople, The Verge reported Monday. “During a show of hands meeting with Twitter employees today, Musk said the company is done with layoffs and actively recruiting for engineering and sales roles and that employees were encouraged to make recommendations, according to two people present and a partial recording obtained by The Verge," the report said.

Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Oct. 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 pledge to "work long hours at high intensity" to keep their jobs; the ultimatum came with the choice to stay with the company or resign with three months severance.

Some sales workers who opted to stay on after Musk's ultimatum were reportedly fired soon after. With the latest departures, Twitter would have ended up with around 2,700 employees. Musk also laid off around 5,000 contractors and banned remote work, while warning staff of the "catastrophic" economic outlook.

At yesterday's town hall meeting, Musk reportedly told staff that "in terms of critical hires, I would say that people who excel in writing software are the highest priority." Another report from Verge last week stated that "Twitter recruiters have already started contacting outside engineers to see if they want to join 'Twitter 2.0 - an Elon Company'"

Musk is looking for 'anyone who actually writes software'

Musk told employees in his ultimatum email that under his leadership, Twitter will be “much more engineering-focused. who write good code will make up the majority of our teams and have the greatest influence."

Once Musk's ultimatum passed, he began meeting 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 p.m. today. Before you do, please email a bulleted summary of what your code engagements have achieved in the past ~6 months, with up to 10 screenshots of the most important lines of code."

Twitter's careers page did not list any job postings today. There were over 100 job openings before Musk took over.

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