Buck up, Twitter employees: If your job gets Musk’ed, there might be a new gig waiting for you at the City and County of San Francisco.
With layoffs at the SF-based social network looking inevitable, the Mayor’s Office said this week that the city is exploring ways to snap up laid-off Tweeps for government jobs amid a citywide hiring shortage.
The city has around 4,800 vacancies right now—a rate of 9.4% spanning multiple departments, said the Department of Human Resources. Vacancies are particularly high in information technology and legal—two areas that might well overlap with the skills of laid-off Twitter workers.
“City jobs are amazing jobs; they can take some time to get, but once someone gets them they don’t often leave,” said Mawuli Tugbenyoh, spokesperson for the city’s human resources department.
While the city can’t compete with the lavish perks historically offered by tech firms—stock options, travel stipends, kombucha on tap—working for the city comes with its own charms, such as top-flight benefits, flexibility and job stability.
After months of Elon Musk-induced chaos, stability may indeed be a selling point for Twitter workers facing a dramatic management shake-up.
After closing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last week, Musk immediately canned several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust and safety. Twitter employees voiced unease on the social app Blind as personnel from Tesla—one of two other companies Musk operates—showed up to help trim the fat at the 7,500-person social network.
Musk is planning to terminate the company’s work-from-anywhere policy and hand out 3,700 pink slips—equivalent to roughly 50% of the staff—starting on Friday, according to Bloomberg.
Last week, Musk tweeted a memo that sought to assure skittish advertisers that the site wouldn’t become a hate-filled “hellscape” on his watch. Days later, however, that conviction was called into question after Musk himself circulated a homophobic conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi in a now-deleted tweet.
On Tuesday, Musk pledged to start charging $8 per month for “blue check” Twitter account verification to scare up more revenue at the debt-laden company, which went public in 2013 but has never been consistently profitable.
The city’s human resources department said that it plans to work with local nonprofits and other groups to help recruit laid-off tech workers, and that it’s also working on broader reforms of its notoriously slow hiring processes.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In an interview with ABC 7 on Tuesday, Mayor London Breed said that she likes to maintain relationships with local CEOs and that she’d be open to meeting with the new Chief Twit if the opportunity presents itself.
Last month, Breed took a dig at Musk in a Bloomberg interview as “the person who got a ton of tax breaks in California and decided to take that money and run."
Tesla moved its headquarters from Fremont in the Bay Area to Austin, Texas last year. SpaceX, also helmed by Musk, is based in Hawthorne, California, in Los Angeles County.