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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

#241

Post by MikePlacid »

tartoran wrote: post #186
MikePlacid wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

I will be glad to clarify your understanding of my story, but it is hard to do when you have not described what your understanding is. But let me try. The context was:

Thesis:

Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run.

Argument:

Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market.

(My comment was: Plain, simple truth.) The argument continues:

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 didn't have much of an output.

(My comment was: Plain, simple truth again. My story: just an illustration what my "living experience" as a software engineer was in these conditions. Basically: if your do not want to spend a lot of time in lines, you can't get milk. Not enough milk was produced to cover all the money paid to all the workers. Only sour milk to those who prefer to spend their time working.)

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

#242

Post by azanar »

kelnos wrote: post #132
azanar wrote: post #80

It seems many commenters in several threads are making the same point. I'll summarize it here: > Creating an excessively competitive environment by working longer hours because of an ability and desire to do so is bad civic hygiene. I can say I understand the sentiment. I personally very much dislike the bind someone puts me in if they do my job for cheaper. I dislike it _more_ when I see them suffering because of th…

It's the human equivalent of the race to the bottom. A company with deep pockets (or VC funding) might sell a product at or below cost to try to muscle out competitors. The end result is either a monopoly (where the company can then raise prices up to whatever profitable levels they want) or long-term lower prices and weak margins. In the same way, an individual worker might want to work longer hours in order to be m…

There was a possibility I proposed, which I think you missed. Maybe they _aren't_ miserable. They might be suffering in some ways. They might even complain about it. That doesn't mean they are miserable. They may find other joy that makes up for the suffering.

If we can't agree on this, we'll probably not agree on anything else. It'll mean you've decided on a premise that I think is false. I'll just keep seeming ignorant to you.

_Should_ they be miserable? Perhaps. Maybe they have a false consciousness. Maybe they need to understand better the societal effects they are responsible for. These are debatable. To _presume_ this is true, though, seems to me kind of arrogant.

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

#243

Post by ilyt »

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…

Well, question is really who will pay investigative journalist ? Independently funded ones would be overall better option but that's not exactly easy sell ("I might or might not produce some content once in a while") and "getting the name for yourself" first is pretty much requirement for crowdfunding.

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

#245

Post by scottcodie »

sangnoir wrote: post #232
EarlKing wrote: post #114

> 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. Gosh, I wonder these two incidents are related? PROTIP: Don't distribute tools to facilitate…

Do employees have the right to access past performance reviews manually? If so, it's not "exfiltrating company property". Do you draw the line at automation?

Twitter's actions seems like retaliation against the employee for enabling other employees to collect evidence of discrimination. Performance reviews often exist to reduce the companies liability when firing people off, but being fired with good performance reviews can work against them.

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

#246

Post by ilyt »

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.

I think it comes from the fact that musk & his cult got shit thrown their way from Twitter-leaning people when he started talking about free speech, as it appeared that they were unhappy that Twitter might stop banning people that have "incorrect" political opinions.

So the firings is seen as "karma" coming back to people that "didn't wanted free speech", even if fired person might be utterly unrelated to the whole thing.

> fired in such inhumane ways

gotta complain to your legislators here, musk would be fucked if he tried shit like that in EU...

> The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.

That's basic human group behaviour and nothing characteristic for any political group. The other side behaves literally identical. Or, well, as usual, the some individuals in the group do, but, also as usual, the more extreme elements of a group often form its public image.

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

#247

Post by MikePlacid »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #161
MikePlacid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True. But the article does not mention that it was the boss who told the author to pitch in:

>Some of us had worked through the weekend trying to help out a colleague who’d been given an insanely tight deadline

Note: the deadline was given to "a colleague", not to "our team". Same here:

>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in.

Also note that he seems to never have worked on such a schedule before:

>I actually quite enjoyed it.

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

#248

Post by MikePlacid »

katbyte wrote: post #154
MikePlacid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because blue check was released with no issues what so ever?

"No issues" is a requirement from some other context. Probably.

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

#249

Post by ilyt »

badpun wrote: post #62
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.

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…

I'm suspicious many redesigns came from just that.

The app is needed, so we hire people to make app. We got a bunch of designers and developers to develop UI in a team.

But OH NO!, WE DID A GOOD JOB! EVERYTHING WORKS AND IS EASILY EXTENSIBLE!

What next? There isn't enough work on the new stuff ? We just add UI for a feature other team develops every so often, that's not enough work to go by.

And, more importantly, MANAGER CAN'T MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK GOOD when doing only maintenance and not delivering features.

What to do, what to do? I know ? Let's rewrite perfectly functioning UI again! Let's fuck around with stuff that works fine already. Make it look "modern" while we're at it. Use new framework so we can't reuse that much code. That will keep the devs busy and manager getting bonuses!

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

#250

Post by ilyt »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #177
aussieshibe wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Entirely depends on severance package.
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