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Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

economist.com

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Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#61

Post by fzeroracer »

smoldesu wrote: post #8

The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article. I still don't really understand what there is…

Normal according to who, exactly? Like where is your reference point for 'normal'? I've worked for companies at scale and have never dealt with these sort of problems before because usually there's an understanding that employees when laid off aren't going to do anything bad (unless you're perhaps cutting them out of severance and spiting them, which...).

Do you have any reference points or reasons why you believe this is normal contrary to my own professional experience?

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#62

Post by badpun »

retskrad wrote: post #42

It's fascinating how Elon Musk supporters on Twitter cheered, almost like a sports team, when the Twitter employees got fired in such inhumane ways by Elon Musk. Don't his supporters realize that Elon would do the same thing to them if they worked at Twitter? The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.

Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run. Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market. Many of those people had little to do and so, when people got their salaries at the end of the month, there wasn't that much stuff in the stores to buy with it, as the companies didn't have much of an output.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#63

Post by chadash »

infamouscow wrote: post #16
smoldesu wrote: post #8

The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article. I still don't really understand what there is…

Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. It merely continues to exist because their business model, advertising, allowed them pivot into being drama generating entertainment machines.

Top 10 articles from the front page of nytimes.com right now:

* E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks

* A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it.

* U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers

* Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market?

* Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy

* As Officials Ease Restrictions Amid Protests, China Faces New Pandemic Risks

* Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find

* Kanye West was suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika.

* Cameroon Tries to Become Third African Nation to Advance

* From The Athletic: Follow real-time updates from Serbia vs. Switzerland.

Sure, some of these (e.g. first twitter headline) seem to follow an agenda, but most of these are just plain old news. It is easy to think "all of this is available on Twitter or through other independent journalists", but twitter has the luxury of being able to look at what the papers are reporting on. If you didn't have the likes CNN, NYT and the BBC, you wouldn't have reporters at white house press conferences, people reporting from Ukraine, nor any sort of real curation of the news.

Are there blind spots? Of course. Twitter is way better in some niche areas. Do the news outlets show biases? Yes, of course. But without the big news outlets, twitter wouldn't have as much to go off of. I like to think of it the other way around... imagine that corporate media didn't exist. You'd have thousands of independent journalists looking into different things with no curation. Eventually, some of them would realize that to be effective, they need to form groups, since some areas are too big for one person to cover. Eventually, small groups that people followed would grow larger as they try to report on more and more things. Eventually, they'd collectivize and form larger "corporations". You'd be back to square one.

And I'm just talking about plain old news. All of this is leaving aside the big and costly investigative pieces that some of the larger outlets are able to put together. Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#66

Post by blooalien »

tylersmith wrote: post #29
fnimick wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that peo…

If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut.

> "If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut."

While you're 100% correct in that, I do believe the "parent" post is against people being put into situations where they begin to feel that such actions are their only remaining option if they ever want to have a life outside of work.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#67

Post by ff317 »

kdmccormick wrote: post #46
ketralnis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and…

I appreciate that you represent both sides of argument here, but I've found a way to frame it for myself that removes all the dissonance: You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could: * contribute to an an open source project or start your own * start a side project/business * volunteer somew…

Another interesting way to split the difference: identify a need at $work that could really use a better open source solution that $work could use off-the-shelf. Go write that on your free nights/weekends as an independent open source project that's more-broadly useful to others outside of $work, and then when you're back on the clock, switch hats and make use of it.

With this hybrid approach, you're still advancing the cause at $work, but you're not doing it directly or exclusively for them, and the open source project will have visibility, scope, and utility beyond $work and your employment there. You never know, it might even be the start of future promising career opportunities.

There be dragons of course with how exempt employment and copyrights work in the US, though (as in, this might be a trivial case where if the side-project is successful, your employer can claim rights on it). You could come to some agreement with your employer ahead of time about the independence of such projects, though.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#68

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

spoils19 wrote: post #4
spaced-out wrote: post #3

>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it. I wasn’t really thinking about whether those changes were good for Twitter; I just really liked being part of that community, working together on a deadline. I even slept on a sofa in the office on Saturday night. It's not cool to paint pressuring employees to work long hours as a…

A user on HN, kamaal, posted something that many on this site agree with: > Let's be honest this is far from what people call slavery. They are being paid multiples of six digit salaries, RSUs and work in one of the most happening tech ecosystems of the world. > I would love to be a part of something like this. Heck most of us would love to be a part of something like. > I kind of envy those guys working on these pro…

On the other hand "exempt" employees as we're legally defined, make less money per hour the more we work because we're "exempt" from overtime pay.

The fact this is even legal indicates congress sold out the working class in the '80s.

Sure you may be able to slack off a lot in some jobs, and effectively make more money per hour. But it's an absolute certainty that if you work 80 hours a week, you're not going to be paid more as an exempt employee. It's one of the nice things about being a contractor, you can actually get overtime pay. And as a result most companies will be strict about not making you work more than 40. Funny how that works.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#69

Post by JasonFruit »

afavour wrote: post #36
concordDance wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast vast vast majority of content news media generates is not like that, its drama farming and reposts. The actual investigative journalism is a very small minority.

So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false. I'm not defending the clickbait content a lot of outlets engage in but I'm concerned that if the "corporate media" disappeared tomorrow a lot of things would go uninvestigated. I'm also not sure that the number of stories published is a worthwhile metric either. Maybe one truly eye-opening investigative story is worth a hundred boring…

Would you be more satisfied with, "Only the tiniest fraction of corporate media's output has intellectual value?" People often make statements that make what is approximately true absolute, for simplicity of expression or for style: "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" "The oboe is an ill woodwind that nobody blows good."

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#70

Post by fnimick »

tomcam wrote: post #30
fnimick wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that peo…

Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Yes? They raise the bar for every other player. Great as a spectator, bad as a participant.

Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.

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