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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

#221

Post by sokoloff »

kdmccormick wrote: post #139
ketralnis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, you choose to Uh huh. So? That's what choose means. You only care because you're competing with them, but that's not really their problem. That doesn't resolve any of the dissonance at all. What if their motivation isn't enjoyment but money, so they're choosing to outcompete you. What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that…

> What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that change the calculus? Yes, it does. I should have been more clear in the outset: I am frustrated by people who work more than 40 hours because they enjoy doing it , not because they need to in order to make ends meet. If you work 60hrs/week in order to pay off student loan debt and feed yo…

One of my core values is encouraging people to make their own choices in how they spend their life.

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

#222

Post by leereeves »

amrocha wrote: post #210
factsarelolz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's staging data for exfiltration. This is an attempt to take property and data not owned by the employee.

If this was true they would have disabled the download email button. Stop siding with the company by default.

It's obviously true, unless Twitter employees were regularly using work e-mail for personal data. You don't need a tool to download a few performance evaluations.

They haven't disabled the "download email button" because there are legitimate reasons for employees to download data (e.g. opening files in local apps), but trying to retain access after being laid off is not one of them.

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

#223

Post by sangnoir »

smoldesu wrote: post #200
mhoad wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tell…

It's not hard to maintain a frozen codebase with a skeleton crew. This is practiced routinely at many organizations during end-of-year holidays when many people take PTO.

However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe

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

#224

Post by dibt »

aussieshibe wrote: post #156
pessimizer wrote: post #120

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.

What was the "inhumane" manner?

From https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588671155766194176

"Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required."

Seems reasonably generous. Certainly not "inhumane."

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

#225

Post by horsawlarway »

tyingq wrote: post #121
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…

I think it's more the dichotomy of companies asking for high levels of commitment, loyalty & trust, but offering none in return. It's funny that they would fire people in this way, then turn around and ask the remaining folks to sign up for "working long (uncompensated) hours at high intensity" . They are trying to have it both ways.

I mean - no offense... - but if you still think corporate entities have any real loyalty you've clearly not been paying attention for a long time.

I've never seen that attitude last beyond the initial 50 or so employees at a startup, and it sure as fuck doesn't last past the "we're installing monitoring software on all your machines" stage.

Work is what you do to get paid - it's not your family. It's not your friend. Don't treat it like it is.

That doesn't mean don't take it seriously, or respect it - just understand that work is your family like a hooker is your girlfriend - it's only true until the money runs out.

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

#226

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

>> nothing significant has broken yet.

Yet. That we know about. As the system trends towards entropy.

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

#227

Post by skeeter2020 »

Zafira wrote: post #215
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. This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.

Or recognition that systems require ongoing work to delay and repair the inevitable entropy that grows within them.

The only system that does not require ongoing maintenance is one that no one uses.

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

#228

Post by mandeepj »

bottlepalm wrote: post #217
mandeepj wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I mean if you count the farmers who grew the beans that the astronauts ate then you could say 'we all' worked on Crew Dragon.

> I mean if you count the farmers who grew the beans that the astronauts ate then you could say 'we all' worked on Crew Dragon.

But, that's not what happened or I implied. Read for yourself -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

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

#229

Post by jjav »

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…

> nothing significant has broken yet

A large company is more than their website. Legal teams, regulatory compliance, infosec, etc. Apparently most of that is gone.

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

#230

Post by Mikeb85 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #199
Mikeb85 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

5000 salespeople and moderators? Please... They don't need that.

Besides, my comment was about Walmart, which has over 10,000 stores... So of course they have more employees than Twitter by a huge margin.

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