'Businesses are not families,' says sacked Twitter worker who went viral for sleeping in office

After being laid off, a senior employee at Twitter who went viral last year for sleeping in the office said that businesses are not family and needs can be changed. In a thread of tweets, Esther Crawford said that layoffs could be jarring as it suddenly takes away your identity. She added that if one is truly passionate about the problem and work, it greatly affects them.

Crawford's tweet read, "For those laid off, it can be jarring to suddenly have a piece of your identity taken away — especially if you were truly passionate about the problem & work. It’s normal to have a lot of feelings as you rebuild a new routine and plan for the future."

She said that roles change after layoffs in a company. Some people move up the ladder to replace those who left. "If you're one of those people it's okay to shoot your shot. Leaders are made in these moments," she continued in a Twitter thread.

Crawford added that the employees who remain in the company after layoffs shouldn't be demonized and rather should be shown some empathy as they have to pick up more work than earlier.

She stated that at the end of the day, business is not family but team. A tweet in her thread read, "At the end of the day businesses are not families - they’re teams. The company’s needs can change or new directions can emerge. If you’re delivering with excellence then you can feel good, no matter what happens or when your time is up."

The latest firing comes after a week since the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate with each other, as per a report by The New York Times. The report quoted current and former employees as saying that employees were prevented from chatting with each other or looking up company data after the company’s internal messaging service Slack was taken offline.

With this fresh round, Twitter CEO has executed at least four layoff rounds since his hostile $44-billion takeover of the company in October 2022. The recent cut targeted a number of departments, including ads and infrastructure engineering. Now, the company likely has less than 2,000 employees, which was about 7,500 when Musk took over.