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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

#111

Post by kelnos »

smoldesu wrote: post #50
VHRanger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount. They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.

I mean, the running joke in the industry was that you could fire 90% of Twitter's workforce and the company would still run fine. Judging by how few features they've shipped in the past few years, I'm still convinced that's the case.

I doubt that's actually true (I don't doubt that Twitter had too many employees, but I think 90% redundant is a bit hyperbolic), but even if it was, there are good ways and a bad ways to reduce workforce. Musk chose pretty much the baddest of the bad ways.

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

#112

Post by the-printer »

afavour wrote: post #91
JasonFruit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be more satisfied with, "Only the tiniest fraction of corporate media's output has intellectual value?" People often make statements that make what is approximately true absolute, for simplicity of expression or for style: "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" "The oboe is an ill woodwind that nobody blows good."

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 loss of the will to report on everything other than that in corporate media’s hypothetical absence.

We can even go as far as to say that corporate media likely will not disappear anyway, and if it were to, in 2022, it would just be repackaged in a different format with new corporate or neo-corporate entities in its place.

In conclusion, and irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of “corporate media produces nothing of value” or the more analytically amicable, “only the tiniest fraction of corporate media produces value”, I hereby declare an end to all corporate media and it’s theoretical subsequent reiterations.

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

#113

Post by dragonwriter »

VHRanger wrote: post #44
cuttysnark wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't really understand what there is worth talking about here. Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist becau…

Nonsense. Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount. They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.

> Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.

Any private equity firm would probably not have come to the recommendation of purchasing a firm that was, in ongoing terms, narrowly profitable in a transaction that would saddle the firm with about a third of its annual pre-acquisition revenue, several times its annual profit, and a sizable share of its project post-acquisition reserves in annual debt service costs, even if the particular buyer wasn’t one where the mere prospect of the purchase would disrupt revenue.

As much as they can be very much be criticized, there is a sense in which criticizing Musk’s post-acquisition actions at Twitter is akin to criticizing actions of the Titanic’s officers and crew after the encounter with the iceberg.

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

#114

Post by EarlKing »

> 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 the exfiltration of company property and expect to keep your job.

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

#115

Post by amrocha »

beau_g wrote: post #51

>My boss was fired. So was his boss. And his boss’s boss. And their boss. At least 5 direct reports between a talented engineer working on a critical feature with huge media attention and the leadership? Seems like a lot.

seems pretty normal to me.

Engineer -> team leader -> director -> VP -> CXO

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

#116

Post by bottlepalm »

themitigating wrote: post #110
smoldesu wrote: post #8

The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article. I still don't really understand what there is…

Notoriously overstaffed based on what? The fact that you've heard this repeated in different ways over a long period of time?

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

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

#117

Post by Raed667 »

kadoban wrote: post #104
Raed667 wrote: post #31

This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" You never know when that bank statement, or rent agreement or whatever will suddenly become inaccessible. Edit: I know we're not supposed to mix personal data with work. But who hasn't downloaded some docs because you need them filled or printed or something.

Anything you do on work hardware, it the US is pretty much free range for them to snoop into as much as they want. Putting that kind of stuff on your work laptop is just unthinkably weird to me. Why would anyone do that?

I guess my rule of thumb is "Am I ok with HR seeing this?", this is more about access (tax papers, paystubs, bank statements, ...) than privacy.

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

#118

Post by kelnos »

kadoban wrote: post #104
Raed667 wrote: post #31

This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" You never know when that bank statement, or rent agreement or whatever will suddenly become inaccessible. Edit: I know we're not supposed to mix personal data with work. But who hasn't downloaded some docs because you need them filled or printed or something.

Anything you do on work hardware, it the US is pretty much free range for them to snoop into as much as they want. Putting that kind of stuff on your work laptop is just unthinkably weird to me. Why would anyone do that?

Because most people don't actually care all that much about privacy, at least when the consequences aren't immediately obvious.

Sure, if you flat-out ask someone if they'd be comfortable posting their bank statements on Facebook, they'd say no, of course not. But even if people know that their employer can snoop on the contents of their work laptop (I imagine some people don't realize), it's a hypothetical threat. And often people have some sort of implicit trust in their employer, anyway, for some strange reason.

In my experience, most people put personal things on their work laptop, and don't think twice about it. Unfortunately you're actually the "weird" one, even though I totally agree with you.

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

#119

Post by mikeyouse »

bottlepalm wrote: post #116
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?

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

Had $5b in annual revenue and served hundreds of million of tweets daily?

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

#120

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Layoffs aren't particularly inhumane, they're common, especially after a change of leadership. If you want workers' rights, fight for them. It's bizarre to make it into a soap opera of judging the moral worth of great men.

It's bizarre how Musk has been propped up into a surrogate for the bad aspects of capitalism, especially by an administration that just overruled a union vote through legislation.

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