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

301–310 of 317 posts

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

#301

Post by ilyt »

raydev wrote: post #260
ilyt wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean musky boi did show up that being the case. But it's not the firings that directly caused that, it's musk's starting to make sweeping changes from the get go and ones that drove the ad money away.

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

#302

Post by themitigating »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #230
kllrnohj wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't know what they need, you don't have any useful information.

The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.

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

#303

Post by the-printer »

ilyt wrote: post #300
the-printer wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your’re tiptoeing around the gravity of situations such as, “how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting in remedial legislative efforts.” [Pulitzer Prize winning investigation, 2014] I would hope that the people who are involved in uncovering actions like this don’t perceive their practice as a mere job or a hobby, relative to whether they’re paid for it.

In the scenario we’re discussing (a world without corporate media), people who truly care enough about events, plots and schemes that threaten the moral fiber, dignity, agency and safety of humanity will see to it that they’re uncovered. That is unless, all investigative journalists are frauds who are driven only by glory and gold.

What you’ve described would be “better”, sure. It would be “better” if it rained during a drought than if it didn’t. But what are people going to do in the meanwhile?

Is “corporate” media the only kind of media there is that can present the news either way?

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

#304

Post by TomSwirly »

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…

"I sold all my fire extinguishers, got rid of all my insurance, and got rid of the locks on my doors yesterday, and nothing has happened! This proves no one needs any of these things."

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

#305

Post by TomSwirly »

v0idzer0 wrote: post #296
mhoad wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you call a company that lives off ads and just lost its top ten advertisers "thriving"?

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

#306

Post by alexiaa »

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.

it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.

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

#307

Post by subroutine »

ilyt wrote: post #264
subroutine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand, your world view is that normality means disliking your job; anyone who enjoys their job is suffering from stockholm's syndrome. Even if you're making a quarter mil per year, if you stay after-hours with coworker buddies to implement a feature that augments the experience of millions of people, you're a total sucker.

Sure but how many people do that ? I like my job. I like my hobbies better. I'd still not trade hobbies for job just to give users a feature week early. I'm fine with working extra occasionally but that's what I signed for by picking jobs in ops, not because I think that's good. Also, OP is OBVIOUSLY talking about people that maybe have few months of savings and have them getting fired heavily affect their lives, not…

The person in the article.

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

#308

Post by mynameisvlad »

ilyt wrote: post #299
mynameisvlad wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great, now you have money but your life was disrupted during what most call a global recession and with thousands of highly skilled engineers also out there trying to find a job.

While you’re caring for a newborn or desperately trying to remain in the country.

During thanksgiving.

So how exactly does giving someone money not make this a shitty and heartless thing to do? You know, what some might call “inhumane”?

Once again, throwing cash at the problem doesn’t fix it. Getting money might be nice, but it doesn’t magically fix the lack of a job.

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

#309

Post by Mikeb85 »

themitigating wrote: post #302
Mikeb85 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't know what they need, you don't have any useful information. The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.

> The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy.

No, it's because they haven't done anything innovative in a decade and their product is much simpler than a ton of tech companies with half the staff... Their stock price was super depressed and they were losing what, $4 million per day?

It's super obvious for anyone remotely financially literate that they were way overstaffed. Any buyer would have laid off at least half the staff...

Even Jack Dorsey admitted it: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/jack-dorsey-speaks-twitter...

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

#310

Post by aussieshibe »

dibt wrote: post #224
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.

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."

> What was the "inhumane" manner?

You should probably ask this of the original commenter.

I've not made any claims one way or the other about whether anything inhumane happened.

Post reply on HN