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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

#161

Post by mynameisvlad »

MikePlacid wrote: post #102
folkrav wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see when they actually start shipping stuff. Things tend to go smooth when nothing gets deployed...

Right in the article: blue check mark changes. And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.

> And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.

I don't think any of it had to do with people having "nothing better to do on their own projects".

I don't know about you, but if my new boss, the one that threatened to fire 3/4ths of the staff, told me to do something, it doesn't matter what I was working on before, my sole new project would be what the boss wanted.

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

#162

Post by bmj »

horsawlarway wrote: post #103
fzeroracer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Yes, access controls are critically important for many companies in many domains. My employer operates under such operating procedures. It seems reasonable that if your software collects and stores user information, employee access to all systems should be tightly controlled, and "turned off" if an employee is fired, laid off, or quits.

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

#163

Post by tartoran »

spaceywilly wrote: post #106
fzeroracer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I was laid off security walked me from a conference room near the exit to my car. I was not even allowed to collect my stuff from my desk, had to have a friend bring it to me after.

Yeah, that firing process is deeply dehumanising.

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

#164

Post by teeray »

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?

From a sustainability perspective, it’s regrettable that regulations are so fixated on the physical machine. It would be entirely possible to logically segment a work environment from a personal environment on a machine without one’s processes spilling over into the other’s. But nope, we all lug two laptops and two phones (if you use iOS).

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

#165

Post by smoldesu »

toast0 wrote: post #150
bottlepalm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cu…

Managing satellites is labor-intensive. Setting up a really big database and talking to advertisers is not rocket science. Both companies could probably operate with a lower headcount, but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it. They're not worth $44 billion in their wildest dreams, and they've already been hemorrhaging revenue for the better half of a decade. An operationally viable Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter.

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

#166

Post by heleninboodler »

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…

> It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry. > > To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck.

What an odd perspective. I was brought up to recognize that hard work and going above and beyond what was expected is admirable and will get you appreciation, recognition, and advancement. Voluntarily doing work that you think needs doing because you want to be valued isn't bad, it's a life lesson. I got my first software testing job by going above and beyond my menial mailroom duties. I got my first software engineering job by going above and beyond my testing duties. I got all my promotions, bonuses, and stock grants and more than a few job offers by consistently doing more than I had to do.

If there's a project that I'm enthusiastic enough about to want to spend a weekend working on it? Hell yes, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to enjoy myself without worrying that someone else thinks I'm raising expectations beyond the bare minimum. Maybe someone with that attitude just isn't offering as much to an employer and they should get comfy with the idea of others outperforming them.

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

#167

Post by aussieshibe »

factsarelolz wrote: post #136
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.

[dead]

> the ones against the Elon take over cheered when people lost their jobs over a vaccination

Do you have a source for this? What makes you think it's the same people?

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

#168

Post by civopsec »

deltree7 wrote: post #40
throw8383833jj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Here's my hypothesis as to why people are so glib about throwing away their lives for their employer: People depend on their employer for their entire livelyhood. This day and age, without a pay check, you can't have any basic needs: Shelter, food or water and you'd be out on the street or worse: the average homeless person (it's shocking) lives 30 years less than a housed one. So, it's no surprise t…

Can you apply your brilliant logic to Elon Musk who works 100 hours per week? or Warren Buffett who still goes to work? Many people enjoy work.

> Can you apply your brilliant logic to Elon Musk who works 100 hours per week? or Warren Buffett who still goes to work?

I called Elon’s boss and he corroborated it. His boss even makes him use one of those punchcard machines—how quaint!

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

#169

Post by rurp »

subroutine wrote: post #95
throw8383833jj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Here's my hypothesis as to why people are so glib about throwing away their lives for their employer: People depend on their employer for their entire livelyhood. This day and age, without a pay check, you can't have any basic needs: Shelter, food or water and you'd be out on the street or worse: the average homeless person (it's shocking) lives 30 years less than a housed one. So, it's no surprise t…

Just so I understand, your world view is that normality means disliking your job; anyone who enjoys their job is suffering from stockholm's syndrome. Even if you're making a quarter mil per year, if you stay after-hours with coworker buddies to implement a feature that augments the experience of millions of people, you're a total sucker.

That's not at all what the GP post said. It's clearly about employees who are fine being exploited at work, not all employees everywhere.

Some employees are OK with working immense amounts of unpaid overtime to please a Musk-type boss. That's a very different situation than the type of employee who has a life outside of work and wants to get paid fairly.

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

#170

Post by mynameisvlad »

the-printer wrote: post #112
afavour wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well like I just said, I'm not convinced looking at it through overall number of worthy/unworthy stories published is a metric that makes a lot of sense. But sure, that statement is an improvement because it at least makes clear that if you were to remove the corporate media tomorrow something of important value would be lost. Something the original statement definitely does not convey.

I am formally challenging the notion that if corporate media were to disappear, people would suddenly lose their will to report and investigate on serious affairs that make up the tiny fraction of valuable content. If anything, there is a likelihood that people would even feel more compelled to do so with the understanding that they cannot expect major news outlets to do the work for them. I do however champion the l…

Your average individual would have investigated something regardless of the presence or absence of corporate media, mostly because these stories don't just immediately happen; they take months of work where the public obviously has no clue what is or isn't being looked into.

But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.

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