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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

#141

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

jeffbee wrote: post #92
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just took a look at the Pulitzer Prize winners for investigative reporting[0] and I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further. If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" whic…

> I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further... I have never heard of We get it, you are uninformed. It was in major newspapers, was on PBS Frontline, and was adapted for radio, and it won a Pulitzer. You haven't heard of it, that's on you.

Wow. This is kind of hurtful being that I consider myself informed about topics I'm interested in. For example YMTC's 232-layer NAND flash was something I heard about as soon as it broke. I don't have a newspaper subscription so it's hard to keep up with everything being that most news on the internet is the same rehashed for content years on end or meaningless celebrity trivia/drama.

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

#142

Post by factsarelolz »

badpun wrote: post #62
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…

This 100%.

Look at how much the employees of SV/FAANG companies donate to politicians and which ones. It's not hard to see the money laundering going on.

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

#143

Post by civopsec »

Raed667 wrote: post #31

This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" You never know when that bank statement, or rent agreement or whatever will suddenly become inaccessible. Edit: I know we're not supposed to mix personal data with work. But who hasn't downloaded some docs because you need them filled or printed or something.

I wiped the computer they gave me and installed my own OS. If I quit or they fire me there is a three month period where I have to work for them anyway.

It would be ideal to have two computers, but I don’t feel like committing to such an expense (it would have to be about equally powerful) in this economy and all that.

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

#144

Post by MikePlacid »

badpun wrote: post #62
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…

It's fun to see a simple plain truth downvoted.

I was a software engineer in the Soviet Union. To buy your family something to eat (like milk, or cheese) you should skip work and spend an hour or more standing in lines at a grocery store. I used a different strategy: work late and around 8 pm there were no lines at you could still buy sour milk, bread and canned fish in tomato sauce. I survived on this and was pretty happy cause I liked my job. But remember the requirement: no kids...

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

#145

Post by Raed667 »

civopsec wrote: post #143
Raed667 wrote: post #31

This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" You never know when that bank statement, or rent agreement or whatever will suddenly become inaccessible. Edit: I know we're not supposed to mix personal data with work. But who hasn't downloaded some docs because you need them filled or printed or something.

I wiped the computer they gave me and installed my own OS. If I quit or they fire me there is a three month period where I have to work for them anyway. It would be ideal to have two computers, but I don’t feel like committing to such an expense (it would have to be about equally powerful) in this economy and all that.

How are you even allowed to access anything related to work without some sort of device-management installed?

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

#146

Post by smoldesu »

fzeroracer wrote: post #131
horsawlarway wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Across basically every company I've worked for - this is normal. And many of those companies are not 3k+ employee tech companies. Think 10 to 100 engineers. It's actually a requirement for many compliance certifications in the US - previously employed staff are not allowed access to your systems. If you're in an office - you can wait until you grab the employee and put them in a conference room to fire them before cu…

The only scenario where I see this being an even remotely reasonably request is if you think someone is a severe risk for harming your systems should they be laid off. In every large company I've worked for (including ones involving high security systems) the standard was that you'd give people a week notice, maybe two weeks of an impending layoff along with a decent chunk of severance. This way those people being la…

It's quite normal, unfortunately. Nobody trusts their employees in a $44 billion company, definitely not in the wake of a highly-televised hostile takeover. They have the MDM software, they intend to lay off the employees anyways... there's no wrongdoing here as far as I can see. This is just how they do things outside the startup sphere, it's not like the CEO is going to schedule you a final Zoom call and have their receptionists bring you a bouquet of roses.

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

#147

Post by gaius_baltar »

chrisseaton wrote: post #39
infamouscow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. Never seen any intellectual value in a BBC drama, comedy, or nature documentary?

> Never seen any intellectual value in a BBC drama, comedy, or nature documentary?

The C of BBC does not look like the current practical meaning of corporation for or typical case. Being state-owned change a lot of things.

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

#148

Post by francisofascii »

kadoban wrote: post #104
Raed667 wrote: post #31

This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" You never know when that bank statement, or rent agreement or whatever will suddenly become inaccessible. Edit: I know we're not supposed to mix personal data with work. But who hasn't downloaded some docs because you need them filled or printed or something.

Anything you do on work hardware, it the US is pretty much free range for them to snoop into as much as they want. Putting that kind of stuff on your work laptop is just unthinkably weird to me. Why would anyone do that?

> Why would anyone do that?

Because of convenience. It is an easy mistake to make. If you have to print something like a rent agreement, do you use your office printer or go through the hassle of sending it to FedEx to print? Also, when you have home office setups configured for your work, it can be a pain to switch everything to your personal laptop, if you even have one.

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

#149

Post by WalterBright »

fzeroracer wrote: post #61
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 th…

One company I'm personally familiar with announced a layoff at a branch office a couple months in advance. When the main branch people showed up two months later to manage the layoff, the building was looted clean and nobody was there. Even the furniture was gone. Only trash remained.

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

#150

Post by toast0 »

bottlepalm wrote: post #116
themitigating wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notoriously overstaffed based on what? The fact that you've heard this repeated in different ways over a long period of time?

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

> The other company.. does what?

Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cut staff willy-nilly, there goes a lot of revenue.

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