Elon Musk starts recruiting engineers for ‘Twitter 2.0,’ wants anyone who can code to join his team

When Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the social media platform had over 7,400 employees on its payroll. However, in the weeks to follow, Musk would go on to gut the workforce, **firing nearly half of all Twitter employees** , and thousands of contractual content moderators, and forcing thousands of other on-roll employees to resign. All in all, as of 8:30 AM Monday (Indian Standard Time), Twitter has just a little over 2,700 employees on the payroll. [caption id=“attachment_11678331” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The number of engineers who have exited Twitter is so huge, that Musk has one simple criterion for his hiring team to follow - hire anyone who actually knows how to write software, irrespective of their qualifications. Image Credit: Pexels[/caption] Elon Musk, in a recent all-hands meeting with the remaining Twitter employees, announced that **he is done with the terminations and is now actively looking to hire** people. Musk and his team of recruiters have already started recruiting engineers and salespeople for the ad-sales team. Some sales employees who opted to stay after **Musk's Twitter 2.0 ultimatum** were reportedly laid off shortly after. The number of engineers who have exited Twitter is so huge, that Musk has one simple criterion for his hiring team to follow - hire anyone who actually knows how to write software, irrespective of their qualifications and work experience. Musk has also asked the existing employees at Twitter for referrals, and that under his ownership and management, Twitter will be “much more engineering-driven.” Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of the team and “have the greatest sway.” The Twitter careers page wasn’t listing any open jobs as of writing this article. There were more than 100 job openings before Musk took over. Musk may have to hire engineers quickly to keep Twitter systems running properly. A Washington Post report quoted a former employee as saying layoffs and other departures “have **left multiple critical systems down to two, one or even zero engineers** .” Gutted departments include “Twitter’s traffic and front-end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services,” a Verge report said.