Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by themitigating » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #234

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?

Their cost in last 4-5 years grew faster than profits, their user base didn't increase that much, which means they have been hiring people that have less and less to do with turning profit to the company. What musk is doing is, well, clown fiesta, but it's easy to look at twitter finances and see someone isn't making company's money

Staffing may or may not be related to whether a company is profitable.

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

#312

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by themitigating » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #165

toast0 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other company.. does what? Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cu…

Managing satellites is labor-intensive. Setting up a really big database and talking to advertisers is not rocket science. Both companies could probably operate with a lower headcount, but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it. They're not worth $44 billion in their wildest dreams, and they've already been hemorrhaging revenue for the better half of a decade. An operationally viable Twitter does not include 7500 emplo…

This statement

"but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it"

Everyone knows it because it's what everyone on the right has been stating without evidence for weeks. You've heard it so much it's become like an obvious fact even though you can't point to any hard evidence. I say this because you make statements like that. As if you are saying "The capital of France is Paris".

You also said

"Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter."

How do you know how many employees it takes? How do you know 1500 is all they need? You just keep making statements without any backing them up nor do I think you can unless you're C level at Twitter

Also any company might be losing money with staff being the main reason but still need that level of staff.

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

#314

Post by ben_w » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 9:02 AM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #235

sangnoir wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well muski boy probably fired many people that will be expensive to replace I heavily doubt most of developers in twitter work on its core functionality. Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.

The core functionality can be replaced by a single, albeit particularly skilled, final year university student project.

It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).

Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.

[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states

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

#315

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

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…

> Twitter was operating way above it’s means.

But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)

> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though

Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.

Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.

So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.

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

#316

Post by ghostbrainalpha » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #295

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought the parallels was that his hard work would have caused on a strain on his bandmates, which it didn't, because he didn't really have any.

I thought Band Mates was the best comparison, because we were talking about fellow employee's suffering at a company. And if your comparison was of Prince to The Music Industry at large, it sort of works, but sort of doesn't because other musicians are Prince's competitors not team mates.

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

#317

Post by folkrav » Thu, Dec 08, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #137

folkrav wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whataboutism never fails to show up. It's entirely possible to attempt to address one issue and having missed, not looked into or plain having been wrong about another one.

This isn't an issue, though, and there's no way to address it. A traded company went through a hostile takeover and the current customers aren't happy - it's a story as old as capitalism itself. If people object to the way it was sold, they should criticize the free market. If people are unhappy with billionaires using their money to tangibly hurt the planet, there are much scarier boogeymen to hunt down than the guy…

"Bad things happen all the time", "we can't change it can we" and "there are worse people" are cop outs at best. People can worry about multiple things, and things can get talked about.