Twitter employees describe their recent workdays as a combination of chaos and 'no communication' as they wait to see who still has a job

• The NYT's Hard Fork podcast recently interviewed two current Twitter employees. 
• The employees described a pervasive sense of chaos at the company.
• Both complained about an absence of internal communication.

Late Thursday evening, employees at Twitter finally received the dreaded email about layoffs. It was the first communication that Twitter's staff had received from the company since Elon Musk took over last week, NBC News reported. 

For many employees, it culminated a week was filled with anxiety, confusion, and chaos about their future at the company. On Friday's episode of the New York Times' Hard Fork podcast, two employees at Twitter shared their experiences from the initial days of the regime change. 

Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton interviewed the employees on Wednesday, and fed the interview transcripts through a text to speech AI generator to create anonymous renditions of their voices. 

Both Twitter employees also used pseudonyms for the interview. One opted for the alias Mockingjay — a reference to the popular series, The Hunger Games — and a telling sign of how dire things had gotten at Twitter. The other spoke under the name Fulcrum. 

In the podcast, Mockingjay described the past few days as an interminable cycle of anxiety. 

"Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels," Mockingjay said, "and it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally."

Mockingjay told the hosts that employees at Twitter were falling into one of two camps. Some were ignored entirely and on the shortlist for layoffs. Others were being pulled into task forces and working nonstop to execute Musk's outlandish demands. 

"I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired," Mockingjay said.

Fulcrum, who provided insight from Twitter's engineering team, concurred with Mockingjay, telling the hosts that the lack of internal communication had turned Twitter into a ripe setting for a horror movie. 

"You could probably make a really interesting ethereal horror movie out of just constantly walking around with nothing," Fulcrum said. 

Many were wondering if they'd ever even lay eyes on their new CEO. 

Fulcrum told the hosts, "It's everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?" 

Fulcrum acknowledged Musk's concerns that the company was too bloated and probably moving slower than it should be in certain departments. 

Yet Musk reportedly ordered for an entire revamp of Twitter Blue, the company's subscription tier, to be completed by Monday. 

"I wouldn't get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That's just completely absurd," Fulcrum said, "and the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that have to be dragged in, that's like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean."

Fulcrum added that it would take at least one to two quarters to execute a revamp of Twitter, or at least three to six months. 

"My dad basically messages me every morning and says, has it happened yet?," Fulcrum told the hosts. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has changed his own location on Twitter to "Hell."

Listen to Hard Fork's full interview with the employees here.