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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

#251

Post by ddellacosta »

lumenwrites wrote: post #52
ddellacosta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point being made, but this is fundamentally naive and counter-productive for everyone who wants to be working in this industry as a software engineer. Engineers are going to get exploited: just shrugging and saying "but we get paid well enough" means stuff like this: https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-ho... will continue to happen over, and over, and over. So, unfortunately, yo…

Shouldn't people be free to make up their own minds and make their own choices? If someone likes that work environment - great, let them work very hard on interesting and meaningful projects, these are the kind of people Elon Musk seems to want to leave at twitter. People who don't like this kind of work environment are free to leave for companies more focused on work-life balance.

I may be trying to persuade, but I'm not being prescriptive. I'm just stating the logical outcome of behaving based on the thinking in the post I was responding to.

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

#252

Post by MikePlacid »

shagie wrote: post #207
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 April 25th, Twitter Locks Down Product Changes After Agreeing to Musk Bid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/twitter-l... --- https://archive.ph/CK1X1 > For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accep…

>In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.

In the context you have provided - yes. But in the context of my professional experience it is rather surprising. Note that the author has not mentioned he was uncomfortable sitting there doing nothing. What he mentioned was:

>we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it.

That looks like that was the first time for him ever. Also quite surprising - for me and my experience.

PS. Also:

>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday

Sweet Jesus. Just "as soon"? Just three??

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

#253

Post by ilyt »

ketralnis wrote: post #11
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…

It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and…

Looking at my country laws you'd be entirely fine to pull the all nighters at work but paid 150-200% for it.

That solves all of that, employer can't just convince gullible teenager to get extra work out of them for little benefit and have active motivation to hire enough people to not have to crunch very often (as doing that makes them pay 2x per hour of work).

Those laws are in place because for every "crunching and happy for it" there is ten that stay for longer out of fear that they will get fired for wanting to work normal amount in favour of someone that lives work.

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

#254

Post by ilyt »

heleninboodler wrote: post #192
kdmccormick wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok.

I don't understand that at all. You'd rather work 60 and 20 of that slack instead of 40 ? Why would you want to have less time for hobbies/family ?

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

#255

Post by bottlepalm »

mandeepj wrote: post #228
bottlepalm wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/...

If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k.

A great example - Boeing had more money, more people and the same external support and they STILL haven't launched a vehicle yet. SpaceX has beat them by almost 4 years and counting. You'd think with '100k people' they could do it by now right?

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

#257

Post by raydev »

smoldesu wrote: post #193
monkey_monkey wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Twitter brought in $5bil in revenue in 2021. That doesn't sound broken. Whether they spent that money efficiently, and whether they could avoid FTC fines, is a different issue.

> That was broken when he bought it.

You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.

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

#258

Post by mynameisvlad »

ilyt wrote: post #250
mynameisvlad wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Highly disagree. You can't just throw money at a problem to make it go away.

These are real people with real lives that were needlessly disrupted on what is supposed to be a day for love and thankfulness. Sure is a shitty and inhumane way to thank your employees.

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

#259

Post by ddellacosta »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #56
ddellacosta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point being made, but this is fundamentally naive and counter-productive for everyone who wants to be working in this industry as a software engineer. Engineers are going to get exploited: just shrugging and saying "but we get paid well enough" means stuff like this: https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-ho... will continue to happen over, and over, and over. So, unfortunately, yo…

Fighting over scraps isn't the best way to see it, IMO. If I'm busting my ass at a job, it's because I share the vision (if not the capital) of the people I'm working for, want to see that vision executed, and want to take an active part in executing it well. If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long. Likewise, whether I work 40 or 60 ho…

> I share the vision (if not the capital) of the people I'm working for, want to see that vision executed, and want to take an active part in executing it well. If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long

This can and should be a condition on top of respecting yourself enough to expect that you are paid for the time you work and have the freedom to establish a good work-life balance based on those hours. Assuming for one second that the folks running the business--if they are any good at it--think about you in anything other than economic terms at the end of the day is simply foolish.

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

#260

Post by raydev »

ilyt wrote: post #237
monkey_monkey wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't – certainly not to the extent that he's destroyed it.

Twitter had profitable years but it wasn't really profitable ... And him firing a bunch of people wasn't why companies stopped paying him (why would they care?), it was every other thing he did with the platform.

I think there's a huge chasm between "management can't stop overspending beyond their decently high revenue" and "management is actively scaring away their revenue generators". I guess technically the former is "broken" but it's not broken in the same way the latter is.
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