Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 317 posts

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

#291

Post by tomcam »

lostdog wrote: post #55
tomcam wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Steph Curry injured his ankle in the 2010 preseason. He failed to recover properly, leading to surgeries and an ankle that keeps failing. We can speculate whether overwork is related to Prince's drug addiction and eventual death. So yeah, failing to rest properly does have bad consequences.

Point was race to the bottom, not "bad consequences"

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

#292

Post by rchaud »

jjav wrote: post #229
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…

> 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.

Most of their big advertisers have jumped ship as well, their revenue will have cratered. Of course as a private company they won't need to disclose by how much, but engineers can't be paid with likes and retweets.

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

#293

Post by tomcam »

ilyt wrote: post #262
tomcam wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Pay me their salary and I'd be all the happy to work weekends. Hell, I'd be able to buy a house after a month. What a fucking stupid comparison...

The comparison is hard workers vs less hard workers, and the former causing a race to the bottom. Mind telling me why the comparison is stupid?

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

#294

Post by tomcam »

fnimick wrote: post #70
tomcam wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Yes? They raise the bar for every other player. Great as a spectator, bad as a participant. Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.

> Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.

I'm glad you think I have that much power! Seriously I'm not suggesting any such thing. But why shouldn't people who work harder reap the benefits. And more to the point, does that cause a race to the bottom?

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

#295

Post by tomcam »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #57
tomcam wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Prince recorded his first album by himself and played all 21 instruments, so he's not the perfect example for this. Michael Jordan might be a great example though, he worked harder then anyone else, and ALSO raised the standard of how hard people needed to work on the team beyond the normal limits. They all did benefit from the Championships that followed, but it was certainly also a strain of the mental health of pl…

> Prince recorded his first album by himself and played all 21 instruments, so he's not the perfect example for this.

Why isn't he a good example? He worked hard and wrote a bunch of good music. He didn't seem to cause a race to the bottom.

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

#296

Post by v0idzer0 »

mhoad wrote: post #205
smoldesu wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk. They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.

You’re just fantasizing. Twitter is fine. Thriving really.

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

#297

Post by ajdude »

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…

> If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed

This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.

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

#298

Post by lostdog »

tomcam wrote: post #291
lostdog wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steph Curry injured his ankle in the 2010 preseason. He failed to recover properly, leading to surgeries and an ankle that keeps failing. We can speculate whether overwork is related to Prince's drug addiction and eventual death. So yeah, failing to rest properly does have bad consequences.

Point was race to the bottom, not "bad consequences"

Ok, I'll fill in the blanks here. The race to the bottom happens because other coaches and players see Curry practicing and playing on a schedule that's unhealthy and feel that they need to do the same thing, so they also fail to recover from their injuries.

So yes, overworking does create a race to the bottom.

To pop up a level, your comparison is very bad. In Twitter's case, the "model" behavior is that engineers are working longer hours, and not whether they are producing better results. A better analogy would be a sports player who trained extra hard and extra long, but didn't improve their level of play, but still all other players were expected to work extra long hours anyways.

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

#299

Post by ilyt »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #258
ilyt wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The assumption here is that if you're paid that well you won't have survival issues or that much problem getting a new job

If there is time to get a big bag of money from your employee the holiday month is the best one

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

#300

Post by ilyt »

the-printer wrote: post #283
ilyt wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To consider financial incentives or any sort of funding is an affront to those affected by a serious matter that may warrant an investigation.

Yet people doing the investigation have to eat and if they are good at their jobs it's better that they do their job, full time, instead of having "investigative journalist" as a hobby in addition to their "normal" job
Post reply on HN