Multiple engineers and product team members at Twitter, including Director of Product Management Esther Crawford, have been fired, according to multiple media reports. Twitter fired at least 200 employees out of the 2,000 employees still working on the platform.
Twitter’s latest layoffs happened after the company made it difficult for employees to communicate with each other by reportedly turning off access to Slack.
Crawford spent over two years at Twitter, according to her LinkedIn, working on projects like Twitter Blue and Spaces. She went viral after sharing a picture of herself dozing in a sleeping bag on the floor at Twitter HQ.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she tweeted at the time.
According to a November report from Financial Times, the move “bothered” some employees at Twitter. One senior staffer told the outlet she was “bootlicking.”
Crawford, however, survived the first three rounds of layoffs and became one of the faces touting Twitter’s new subscription-based verification system.
Following the first round of layoffs in November, The Verge reported Crawford told employees at Twitter that mass firings were “required” for Twitter to survive, which distanced herself from her colleagues.
But that’s now out the window after she was impacted by the latest round of job cuts, which saw at least 50 Twitter workers retrenched over the weekend – including “hardcore Musk loyalists”, according to Platformer reporter Zoë Schiffer.
It’s interesting because Crawford was considered–at least from the outside–to be one of Musk’s most loyal deputies. She was angling for more responsibility at the company, according to Platformer. She was a key piece of his plan to turn Twitter into a service that users would pay for monthly.
“I feel heartbroken that this process has required many good people to leave Twitter, but the business was not profitable and drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company,” Crawford wrote on Slack, according to The Verge.
The lesson here is that even if you sleep on the floor at the office as some sort of sign of your work ethic, to Twitter’s CEO, you’re still just an expense that can be cut. Not even complete devotion to Musk’s more “hardcore” version of Twitter is enough to keep a job there.
