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

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

#191

Post by jenscow »

kelnos wrote: post #118
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?

Because most people don't actually care all that much about privacy, at least when the consequences aren't immediately obvious. Sure, if you flat-out ask someone if they'd be comfortable posting their bank statements on Facebook, they'd say no, of course not. But even if people know that their employer can snoop on the contents of their work laptop (I imagine some people don't realize), it's a hypothetical threat. An…

And it's not just "employer" you need to trust - it's the people in the IT department who can snoop.

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

#192

Post by heleninboodler »

kdmccormick wrote: post #182
heleninboodler wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok. You provide your value and I'll provide mine. To be frank, I'm not sure I'm capable of working harder, but the occasional weekend project because you're fired up about the goals or the challenge is exhilarating. For you to think you can dictate that I shouldn't ever do that seems kind of selfish to me.

PS: how dare you work harder than me! You're raising the bar and that's not fair! ;)

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

#193

Post by smoldesu »

monkey_monkey wrote: post #184
smoldesu wrote: post #157

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…

> 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.

That was broken when he bought it.

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

#194

Post by kllrnohj »

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.

That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.

You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.

Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.

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

#195

Post by mandeepj »

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?

> Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX.

Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees

> multiple manned missions a year to the ISS

Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid

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

#196

Post by shagie »

bottlepalm wrote: post #140
themitigating wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess probably a third of SpaceX is technicians, and Twitter doesn’t really build anything or operate any store fronts.

How large of a sales team does SpaceX have (or need)? How about SpaceX's privacy compliance and data governance? Red team to try to see how a feature could be used nefariously? Internationalization of the content? Moderation and content teams to make sure that the sales or marketing doesn't have to answer awkward questions about why advertisements are showing up in disreputable parts of the site?

Yes, Twitter doesn't build physical things or operate any store fronts... but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of complexity that is within the company and the way that it maintains its funding.

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

#197

Post by reaperducer »

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…

Twitter is notoriously overstaffed, and any new management would start by cutting non-essential engineer positions.

Elon? Is that you?

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

#198

Post by katbyte »

smoldesu wrote: post #172
katbyte wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So based on nothing.

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

#199

Post by kllrnohj »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #174
themitigating wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's exactly the point - Twitter had sales reps & SpaceX didn't. Twitter had moderators and SpaceX didn't. The companies have different external-facing relationships at every level, even ignoring the obviously massive unrelated engineering differences.

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

#200

Post by smoldesu »

mhoad wrote: post #189
smoldesu wrote: post #157

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…

> 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.…

And yet the website is still here. If you want to critique the new leadership, than do it by all means. The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though, and they've even managed to make a few changes I like. The point still stands - Twitter was operating way above it's means. If it actually requires 7500 engineers to keep running, then Twitter doesn't stand a chance anyways. Something tells me that's not the case, though...
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