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

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171–180 of 317 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Am I supposed to answer that?

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the staff they actually need.

Need based on what?

Well, you need one person to press the big red "restart container" button in Kubernetes, and another person to bump the resource limits. So at least two people, in my professional experience.

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

#173
post #162

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…

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.

This is a great way to quickly lose critical information from your engineers. The few companies that do follow what you recommend end up scrambling when a key infrastructure engineer leaves, they immediately cut access and realize that he was the only one who knew how to work certain parts of the system. If you're the kind of company that conducts exit inteviews (which are the majority of large tech organizations) then you're no longer going to get any valuable info out of them by burning bridges like this.

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

#174

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?

I don't see how you can compare two unrelated companies staffing levels. You are simply implying complexity has a direct correlation to the correct workforce amount. Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets

> Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store.

This is a terrible example and you know it. Walmart has physical stores everywhere.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you seriously think Elon works 100 hours a week? What evidence do you have to support this? Most people do find fulfillment out of work, many even enjoy it, myself included. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight to be compensated for what we put in, and doesn't mean we shouldn't practice solidarity with coworkers, many of whom don't have the time to work as much as we do (for example a working mother).

Exactly. A lot of Elon's "working" hours are doing completely unproductive things that he enjoys, like posting childish memes on Twitter or belittling people he has power over.

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

#176

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?

Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed. Best change they've made in years, from where I'm standing. But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big…

Wait you don’t get the login pop up anymore? I still get it constantly, makes twitter pretty much unusable when not logged in

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs aren't particularly inhumane, they're common, especially after a change of leadership. If you want workers' rights, fight for them. It's bizarre to make it into a soap opera of judging the moral worth of great men . It's bizarre how Musk has been propped up into a surrogate for the bad aspects of capitalism, especially by an administration that just overruled a union vote through legislation.

GP didn't say "layoffs are inhumane", but that the manner in which people have been fired is inhumane.

As an example of this, being laid off is not inhumane, but being laid off on Thanksgiving day while on paternity leave certainly is.

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

#178
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Samsung does it with Knox and it works perfectly. If the company wants they can wipe out the Knox environment but my personal files and apps are completely separate. Even the company VPN works just inside the Knox environment.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed. Best change they've made in years, from where I'm standing. But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big…

Wait you don’t get the login pop up anymore? I still get it constantly, makes twitter pretty much unusable when not logged in

I'm using Chromium on desktop Linux, I can scroll through recommended content and user profiles without getting the fullscreen login modal anymore. Maybe it's not rolled out to mobile yet?

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

#180
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.

The BIOS (or equivalent) will be locked on these corporate laptops. You can't install your own OS.
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