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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

#181

Post by Symbiote »

Raed667 wrote: post #117
kadoban wrote: post #104

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?

I guess my rule of thumb is "Am I ok with HR seeing this?", this is more about access (tax papers, paystubs, bank statements, ...) than privacy.

For many people, HR have access to this already — they know how much I'm paid and where I live, my next of kin, etc.

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

#182

Post by kdmccormick »

heleninboodler wrote: post #166
kdmccormick wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I should be clear that I am talking about expectations of time, not expectations of effort or competance.

I work 40 hours a week, no more. (If paid overtime were a thing at my company, I might do more. But it's not.) I bust my ass during those 40. Sometimes I work on personal side projects in my free time for fun or to sharpen my skills.

If you want to be promoted, I'd rather you work harder and smarter, not more. If a coworker of mine got promoted because they worked weekends, I would actually be pretty frustrated at them.

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

#183

Post by therouwboat »

smoldesu wrote: post #157
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?

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…

Why is Elon asking them to stay late and be "hardcore" if there is nothing to do?

From article: "As soon as Musk actually took over, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday." I wonder why...

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

#184

Post by monkey_monkey »

smoldesu wrote: post #157
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?

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…

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

Apart from Twitter's ability to generate revenue.

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

#185

Post by WalterBright »

tartoran wrote: post #160
WalterBright wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Source please? It really sounds like a myth but let’s see your source

My source is myself. I knew the people involved. No, I'm not going to name names.

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

#186

Post by tartoran »

MikePlacid wrote: post #144
badpun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you mind reframing what you’re trying to say here (because it doesn’t make much sense in this context)?

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

#187

Post by heleninboodler »

godshatter wrote: post #134
spaced-out wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Pass…

This is probably why they got fired: > One day I created a tool that made it faster to download things from your work email that you might need if you were looking for a job: performance evaluations and that sort of thing. I posted the tool on Slack so that my colleagues could also benefit from it if they needed to. One hour and four minutes later I was fired. I credit them for wanting to help their peers and it soun…

My take on this is that this guy is your typical high-performing developer with a huge ego and an attitude that he's untouchable because he's been valued so much at every job he's ever had. He was reckless to release his tool because he never imagined that management would suddenly become so thin-skinned that he'd get fired over something like that. Well, he was wrong about this particular management, and he found out. I haven't tried to find any of his info on social media, but I'd be willing to bet that aside from some public griping about it, he's not feeling like he screwed up big-time. Most likely, he's wearing this as a badge of honor that demonstrates how capricious and short-sighted Elon Musk is to fire a clearly valuable engineer just because that engineer likes to buck authority. The consequences are that now he has a good "why I got fired" story, and he needs to spend a little time and effort finding his next wildly overpaid job. NBD

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

#188

Post by chasing »

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…

"Hey, boss. I'm going to need you to go ahead and pay me twice as much this week. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to work any extra. But just think of the sense of accomplishment you'll have seeing me drive into the parking lot in the new car that you helped make happen! High five!"

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

#189

Post by mhoad »

smoldesu wrote: post #157
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?

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…

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/28/twitter-loses...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/30/tech/twitter-eu-complianc...

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

#190

Post by 1983054105 »

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.

In France, I have the same 3 months period where I still have to work. If they decide to lock my computer during this period, I'm free to stop working and tell them to provide me with a new computer ASAP since I cannot do anything at all.

Unless they want to fire you and then they still could remove those 3 months and give you some money instead. It would be stupid of them to give me a free salary for 3 months: either they fire me properly, or they give me a computer.

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